Civica helps NHS trusts improve patient care with Computacenter datacenter services

Customer challenge

Civica's Paris system enables community-based healthcare organisations to create, share and manage electronic patient records. Paris needs to be highly available to ensure healthcare professionals have continuous access to up-to-date patient information. To safeguard service levels and meet its contractual obligations for the NHS National Programme for IT, Civica needed an experienced partner to host the Paris application.

Computacenter solution

Computacenter provides datacenter hosting, monitoring and management for Paris' back-end infrastructure, which includes an HP blade farm, HP and Unix servers, a tape library and NHS N3 network connectivity. Computacenter provides 24x7 infrastructure monitoring and manages a third party maintenance provider to ensure a rapid response to any problems.

Results

By partnering with Computacenter, Civica can provide NHS organisations with predictable and affordable access to its Paris system. Computacenter's datacenter hosting service also safeguards compliance with NHS security standards and service levels. As a result, Civica can maintain its reputation and competitive advantage while also enabling NHS trusts to maximise efficiency and deliver a higher quality of patient care.

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Customer profile

Electronic patient records for community-based care
Civica Group Ltd is a market leader in specialist systems and outsourcing services that help organisations improve service delivery and efficiency. The company specialises in a number of sectors, including health, local government, education, social housing and enforcement.

Blending consulting, software and managed services, the group supplies more than 1,800 customers in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and North America, including 90 per cent of the UK's local authorities. Civica was quick to recognise the shift towards 'person-centric' information systems within the public sector, particularly the NHS, and developed Paris to help organisations make this transition.

Paris enables community-based healthcare organisations, such as district nursing, mental health units and community therapy services, to create person-centric electronic care records for their patients. The solution is used by NHS organisations across the UK, including Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust and Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Trust.

Business challenge

Ensuring 24x7 availability of data for healthcare professionals
In 2007, Civica was awarded a contract by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), a Local Service Provider (LSP), for the delivery of its Paris system as part of the NHS National Programme for IT. Under the contract, Civica is responsible for implementing, hosting and maintaining the Paris system on behalf of CSC for NHS trusts.

Due to the nature of the information stored within Paris, which includes patient contact details and treatment plans, the system must be secure and highly available on a 24x7 basis.

John Hopkins, Sales Director at Civica, comments: "Paris needs to be continuously accessible to safeguard the efficiency of day-to-day NHS services and the quality of care. In the event of an emergency, healthcare professionals and even the police may need immediate access to Paris to ensure an appropriate response."
To deliver a reliable, secure and cost-effective service to CSC and the NHS trusts it serves, Civica needed to partner with an IT outsourcing specialist for hardware/software technical support and system hosting.

Computacenter solution

Reliable datacenter hosting service
Following a competitive tender, Civica decided to partner with IT services and solutions provider Computacenter under a three-year contract. "Computacenter has the facilities and capabilities to provide us with a best-practice hosting service, which is crucial for us to deliver on our commitments to CSC and the NHS National Programme for IT." comments John

Computacenter provides hosting, monitoring and management for the business-critical infrastructure that supports Civica's Paris application. This includes an HP blade farm comprising around 35 servers, HP Proliant servers, Unix database servers, an HP StorageWorks tape library and the NHS N3 network that provides access to healthcare professionals.

John comments: "The Paris system is hosted from Computacenter's secure Tier III datacenter in Manchester, with disaster recovery facilities provided from Computacenter's Leeds datacenter."

Computacenter monitors the hardware, operating systems and network on a 24x7 basis and manages a third party maintenance provider to ensure any incidents can be addressed quickly and without impacting end user access to the Paris system. "Computacenter's industrialised service delivery model means that it is able to offer a responsive and proactive hosting service while keeping costs low," comments John.

Computacenter also provides performance data to enable Civica to plan capacity for the future and ensure it can cope with peaks in demand or expansion.

Results

Helping NHS trusts improve patient care
By working with Computacenter to host the Paris system, Civica is able to provide a cost-effective end-to-end managed service to CSC and NHS customers based on high levels of availability and performance.

The advantages of the partnership for Civica and the NHS include:

• Transparent and predictable costs
• Compliance with physical and digital security policies
• Reliable access to patient data

"The Paris system is essential to the NHS trusts that use it, and therefore must offer exceptional availability," comments John "Computacenter helps us to achieve this reliability, which safeguards our reputation and competitive advantage while also enabling NHS trusts to maximise efficiency and deliver a higher quality of patient care."