Download PDF - https://pstg.co.uk/pdfs/PSTG-MOORFIELDS-EYE-HOSPITAL.pdf

Key Gains

• Remote desktop user log in times cut from 10-12 minutes to 20 seconds – boosting clinician productivity to free-up 500 additional hours a week* for patient care
• Users can now ‘workstation hop’ – instantly reconnecting to work sessions the moment they log on at a terminal
• IT spends 50% less time on workspace administration – the team can now focus on improving hospital management and clinical services
• Significant reduction in helpdesk calls – IT resources are directed to more strategic activities
• 65% reduction in terminal servers – less data centre clutter, lower operational costs and a ‘greener’, more efficient, service delivery

*Calculation based on 10 mins x 600 clinicians/patient facing admin teams x 1 login per day x 5 working days

Workspace optimisation and modernisation improves clinician productivity, while delivering a significant reduction in infrastructure management, support and operational costs

Overview

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is a leading provider of eye health services in the UK, and a world-class centre of excellence for ophthalmic research and education. The hospital’s 1,800 staff are committed to the care and treatment of NHS patients with a wide range of eye problems - from common complaints to rare conditions that require treatment not available elsewhere in the UK.

Dedicated to providing first-class care and treatment in the community, closer to where people live and work, Moorfields’ experts see patients at its main hospital in London’s City Road and 20 other satellite locations and community sites in and around the capital.

The challenge

Every day around 600 physicians, clinical admin and nursing staff are involved in the delivery of patient-facing services from the hospital’s numerous satellite locations. These remote users need to be confident they can access all the applications they need to be productive and serve patients well - no matter where they are located, or how frequently they move between sites. 

But the hybrid desktop estate, consisting of standard PCs and thin client devices delivered via a remote desktop service (RDS), was causing a real headache for users and the IT support team.

Staff based at satellites site reported a less than seamless experience when it came to accessing their all-important digital workspace tools. Issues included extended log-in times of around 10-12 minutes, latency delays of up to 20 seconds when accessing critical clinical and line of business applications – including patient records - and problems printing documents locally.

Against a backdrop of rising user frustration, the IT team needed to address the problem fast. Calls to the support desk were escalating, but with remote desktop users now moving into the ‘call logging fatigue’ phase, IT needed to respond to what was becoming a clinical and business priority.

With support costs spiralling, IT needed to overcome the limits of the current desktop infrastructure to deliver the portable workspace mobility clinical teams needed. All the while, maintaining the centralised control and security that would assure maximum productivity for remote workers.

The solution

Moorfields’ IT team turned to PSTG to enable the ‘business as usual’ portable workspace functionality the remote clinical and admin teams need to do their daily jobs. With budgets under scrutiny, PSTG was tasked with accelerating the hospital’s workplace transformation vision – without breaking the bank.

Utilising its deep understanding of the challenges NHS organisations face, PSTG undertook a detailed assessment of the existing desktop estate to pinpoint issue root causes and identify opportunities for optimisation.

In consultation with Tim Mills, IT Technical Expert at Moorfields Eye Hospital, a strategy was defined to reduce the thin client infrastructure and streamline application delivery for users. In addition, the implementation of new centralised workspace management tools would streamline the secure and automated delivery of desktop services to users.

As a first step, PSTG oversaw replacement of the hospital’s ageing estate of 23 physical servers with eight high performance next-generation servers that feature embedded remote management technology to diminish on-site server administration requirements.

“At a stroke, our server room footprint and management overhead was reduced. The new energy-efficient ‘intelligent’ servers extend the connectivity options available to us while enabling faster file transfers,” explains Tim Mills.

To resolve the workspace delivery issue, PSTG next implemented RES Workspace Manager, a lightweight solution that makes it possible for IT to manage employees’ workspaces from a single console. Delivered to the hospital’s thin client devices, it dynamically configures and secures applications, printers and personal settings, and handles data access in a centrally managed workspace – independent of user profiles.

Results

Within three months, the IT team saw an immediate improvement in productivity and user satisfaction. It now takes on average around 20 seconds for workers based at any satellite site or community clinic to log in. Users no longer face an extended wait to get working; the days of spending hours on the phone talking to the IT help desk to get up and running are well and truly over.

Even better, users can now literally ‘hop’ between workstations in the knowledge that the moment they log on, their desktop session will automatically resume – there’s no need to re-launch open applications. All of which adds up to hassle-free extra productivity for clinical teams – and more time dealing with patients.

But the savings don’t end there. The IT team has been able to reduce the number of terminal servers required to support RDS delivery by 65%. Added to which, optimised and manageable application deployment has cut the time and resources required for RDS administration.

With users assured of a standardised and highly portable digital desktop, the IT team has been able to redeploy resources previously utilised to ‘fire fight’ the previous operational challenges relating to terminal services. Instead, they are now able to direct efforts into more strategic activities that better support the needs of clinical user teams.

“Today IT is less reactionary, and a lot more proactive – and that’s been a huge benefit for all,” concludes Tim. “What’s more, the original solution design was proved highly scalable. The environment already been scaled out from the original 550 users to support, on average, 800 concurrent connected users.”