Solving the ageing desktop problem in the NHS

Ageing desktop platforms continue to be an issue in the NHS. The control of purchasing new equipment has been entrusted to the trusts medical groups for a number of years. These groups have either been under funded or chosen medical equipment replacement over IT refresh leaving an old, unsupportable, hard to manage IT estate. This is a common theme through a number of NHS trusts.

The current approach of individual teams refreshing IT or a mass replacement through capital funding has become unsustainable. This means the end user experience has diminished over the years and the clinicians have become frustrated by the slowness of their computers, and the typical lengthy time to log-on impacts their productivity and satisfaction. Local workarounds have sometimes been adopted by users which are in direct contradiction to security and privacy policies. There are now also significant numbers of devices (Windows and IOS) unable to run the latest operating system releases making them obsolete and unsecure.

At the University Hospitals Leicester (UHL), the ‘eQuip’ EUC programme was proposed to resolve these issues and bring the trusts End User Compute (EUC) IT estate up to date in a manageable repeatable way.

NTT DATA and our partners LANDSCAPE, along with UHL have developed a new standard offering for equipping the areas with EUC devices. This provides a consolidated replacement process and includes UHL owned PCs.  Laptops and Apple iOS devices.

The introduction of a new Windows 10 environment as a standard desktop platform and the introduction of a ‘Device-as-a-Service’ approach have helped UHL to predict monthly charges as well as refresh the ageing devices. NTT DATA has repackaged 150 clinical applications into APP-V and deployed them as part of the standard offering. Introduction of a software centre has enabled the user to download licenced applications to their desktops without a call required to the helpdesk. Further promoting the existing Imprivata single sign solution has also provided ease of access for clinicians, multi-use access on windows 10 devices as well as a self-serve password reset for their common applications.

The ‘eQuip’ project is part of UHL’s ‘eHospitals’ programme of works. ‘eQuip’ continues to be an important pillar of this programme and is on track with over 4000 of the 7000 devices in scope already refreshed.

If you would like to find out more about the ‘eQuip’ programme or enquire how we can help your organisation to upgrade and refresh then please contact [email protected] or [email protected]