Best Practice: Delivering critical clinical applications at Liverpool Women’s Hospital

22 Nov 2011

Dr Zafar Chaudry, CIO at Liverpool Women’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, discusses the next-generation network he’s put in place for secure and reliable data transfer, today and tomorrow.

As its name implies, Liverpool Women’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust specialises in the health of women and their babies, both within the hospital and out in the community. It is one of only two such specialist trusts in the UK and the largest women’s hospital of its kind in Europe. A major part of the hospital’s work is clinical research, which enables it to continually improve the treatments and medications it provides. 

Like every hospital, Liverpool Women’s Hospital Foundation Trust is concerned with providing patients with the best possible healthcare, which means pioneering new diagnosis and treatment techniques and adopting the very best working practices. Both place significant extra demands on the network, as Dr Zafar Chaudry, CIO at Liverpool Women’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, explains.

“Every clinical device, from heart rate monitors to MRI scanners and microscopes, is starting to become a network device,” he says. “We not only have to store the massive amounts of data they generate but, to be effective, we have to deliver the information to the point of need, whether that be a consultant on his rounds or a nurse in the outpatient clinic.”

In addition to handling this explosion in data, hospital networks are increasingly called upon to handle voice and video traffic, which puts further pressure on bandwidth. And, of course, with sensitive data patient being accessed all the time, the very best security is absolutely paramount.

When he arrived at Liverpool Women’s Hospital Foundation Trust, Dr Chaudry very quickly realised that the network he inherited needed to be replaced. “It just wasn’t adequate for the Trust’s requirements,” he says. “So I wrote a new IT vision and strategy that led me to scour the market for the best network we could have for the provision of the next generation of hospital care.”

Dr Chaudry’s vision was an intelligent network that would not only adapt to individual’s requirements within the hospital, but would also allow secure remote and wireless access. After carefully assessing the market he chose a Juniper Networks solution designed and implemented by Scalable.

“We needed a reliable infrastructure that would be capable of handling data, voice and video services and applications without interruption or breaches,” says Dr Chaudry. “Working with Scalable and Juniper, that is what we got.”

The network Scalable recommended and implemented is an end-to-end 10Gb network that makes use of Juniper’s virtual chassis technology. Using this technology, the network aggregation layer is eliminated, which does away with bottlenecks and decreases latency dramatically.

The solution also simplifies management, as multiple Juniper switches can be managed as a single logical device. In addition, to deliver the security demanded by NHS Trusts and allow anytime, anywhere access, Scalable recommended Juniper’s modular security platform. The result is a high performance network that is helping to improve patient care.

“Midwives can now access real-time patient data remotely to provide high quality care in the community while reducing time spent updating records back at the hospital,” says Dr Chaudry. “We estimate that staff productivity has increased two-fold through instant, secure remote access to critical applications.”

“Remote access to patient records is fully compliant with national data protection legislation and protection,” continues Dr Chaudry. “Controlled access to digital images through the NHS’s Picture Archiving and Communications system is also providing faster and improved diagnosis for doctors and other healthcare professionals. In addition, we believe we’ve reduced operational costs by 10 percent, through simplifying our infrastructure.”