Accessible, turnkey technology services for the NHS

NHS IT teams are under pressure. They need to cut costs and demonstrate value at a local level, while still delivering on national objectives. Help is at hand from a raft of highly accessible services, available from Microsoft to bolster the resources of any IT team. Gary Flood investigates.

2009 is proving to be a year in which IT budgets are under pressure. Although the NHS still has one year of its three year deal with the Treasury to run, the message has gone out from the Department of Health that leaner times are ahead. 

Already, the talk is of making efficiency savings on top of zero or much reduced growth in healthcare spending. Yet the NHS is still expected to deliver on the ambitious choice and quality agenda set out in the final report of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review last summer.

For NHS IT directors and team leaders, this means a renewed focus on value for money and showing what IT can really do for their organisations. NHS-oriented services from Microsoft can make a big contribution to both.

Premier Support and ITAP: muscle for IT teams

Microsoft Premier Support is a mature and well-developed support framework for larger enterprises that is now being offered – with great success – to individual trusts; especially those looking to 'insource' their IT or move it back in-house to rein-in costs.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s ITAP (IT Architecture And Planning) service is a way for trusts to benefit from the experience of knowledgeable practitioners – many of them former, senior NHS IT staff – in order to shape large-scale business transformation programmes using Microsoft technologies.

Worcestershire Health ICT Services, for example, has signed a Premier Support agreement with Microsoft Services. The result has been improved service delivery planning and the development of a solid technology roadmap that has led to increased efficiency and sharply curbed costs.

A support technician can look after twice the number of desktops that they used to, for example, while travel costs have been cut by 40 per cent. The team now has a great platform for the improved delivery of customer and patient care.

Another Premier Support customer, Leeds Mental Health Teaching NHS Trust, has consolidated its IT assets, improved its in-house knowledge of Microsoft technologies, enabled improved support for patient care and saved some 200 work-hours per year for each member of its IT staff.

The Microsoft UK ITAP team is now engaged in a number of projects with NHS organisations, from NHS Connecting for Health to individual trusts, where a particular focus is preparing the groundwork for the shift to foundation status. ITAP strategist Amos Miller says chief executives and IT directors appreciate the extra assistance offered by ITAP during these major transitional periods.

CRM in healthcare: bringing private sector tools to public service

ITAP staff are well-versed in Microsoft’s technologies as they are implemented in business and corporate settings. Such technologies invariably have applications in healthcare. A good example of a robust and economical technology making the transition from business to healthcare is CRM or customer relationship management software.

Although talking about 'customer' relationship management may seem alien in the context of the NHS, the health service is all about 'relationships' and the complex web of data that makes each patient interaction work – or just happen in the first place.

“There are many relationships of great importance both within the NHS and beyond it to the community,” says Phil Rawlinson, who leads Microsoft’s CRM practice for NHS clients. “The challenge is to track and improve communications between [them].”

Microsoft is now offering NHS-dedicated versions of its enterprise-standard CRM system, Dynamics CRM, for patients and for healthcare stakeholders. Dynamics is available to NHS organisations as a hosted service; managed to enterprise-grade standards of data security by a reliable third party provider.

This not only makes life easy for the IT team (who see little or no additional burden), but also makes costs clear and predictable, since hosted CRM is available for a simple, flat monthly fee.

Furthermore, as hosted services can be switched on and off as easily as a tap, hosted CRM is an ideal way for NHS organisations to try out basic CRM applications. They can start, for example, with email notifications of appointments before committing to the sort of large-scale, all-embracing communications regime which demands greater staff or financial commitment.

Services: the next step in the relationship

“The NHS is one of our biggest customers and also one of our own biggest investments,” Rawlinson says. “We have accumulated a lot of knowledge and expertise about how the NHS works, what problems operators in the NHS face, and what business processes we all need to make things work.

“As a result, behind the scenes, we have a full roadmap of technology services and people ready to continue that relationship and - we hope - deepen it.”