The Practical Cloud: Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust

Private Cloud computing has saved Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) Foundation Trust some 26% of its annual IT costs while "radically" improving availability of services at what is one of the country's leading medical centres.

Like many Trusts, CUH, which treats some 700,000 patients each year, traditionally allowed different organisations within the trust to buy and maintain their own IT services. However, cost pressures, changing medical practice and pressure throughout the NHS to improve patient care meant that model was no longer viable. So, five years ago CUH began virtualising its servers and centralising the services they delivered.

Doug Howe, head of IT at the institution, explains:

“ It's been a journey we've been taking since 2006. The first phase of the virtualisation looks like the answer to a maiden’s prayer: we now have a very strong capability. Partly, we wanted to stabilise an old server farm, but rather than just refresh it we decided to leverage technology to create a private Cloud. We've built capacity to remove aged technology and created an infrastructure to provision applications and get them out to people quickly. ”

He adds:

“We had to get a facility that we move onto the existing site. The whole NHS is driven by cost savings, so if you look at the NHS historically it's been servers. But they have a finite life and overheads in terms of configuration, power, data centres and environmental controls. ”

With the help of supplier EMC's Cloud products, CUH has implemented a model based on the idea of 'Infrastructure as a Service'. The move has reduced its IT costs by 26% - and at the same improved availability of its tier 1 systems to over 99.999%.

As a result, Howe's team now delivers service to client departments in much the same way as a public provider might using a fully virtualised set of resources, pooled, available on demand and with zero administration overhead for provisioning. It is also accessible, securely, to any kind of user or device. Howe affirms:

“ Our focus is to save money and make sure data is available 24/7. Research is funded for one year, so there is lots of number crunching and at the end of it the server isn’t required. Better to lease it from an infrastructure that allows it to be quickly reprovisioned. ”

The new infrastructure has contributed to CUH’s governance too, an increasingly important factor in NHS administration. The system, based on EMCís VMWare and VPLEX software, delivers compliance with legislation that includes the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the NHS Information Governance Toolkit.

The Cloud approach adopted has also allowed the IT department to keep more work in-house. Mark Jowett, CUH Cloud architect, observes:

“Cloud has enabled us to improve our ability to provide services and data availability to our users, which in turn has improved their experience of working with IT on business challenges rather than using external third parties. For example I have recently been contacted to advise on the best way to deliver a 200 Terabyte storage platform to enable genome sequencing, which six months ago we would have not been involved in. ”

In the future, Cloud is set to play a major role in plans for a radical overhaul of facilities at CUH that will involve creating a medical city for research and treatment employing 17,000 people, called the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC). The 140-acre site, reckoned to be the largest concentration of medical facilities in Europe and occupying as much space as Cambridge University itself, will be built on land around the existing Addenbrooke hospital site. In 2015 nearby Papworth Hospital Trust will be joining CUH on the CBC site.

The pair have already drawn up plans for IT systems intended to match their ambitious plans for the CBC. Advertisements inviting bids for the system for the hospitals talk of an infrastructure including "data centres, virtualised servers, networks, PCs, tablets, mobile and remote working devices and round-the-clock support and maintenance services" have already been made public. CUH also has plans for a core electronic patient record with full clinical functionality to integrate with existing systems in back-office departments, including financial systems and business intelligence tools.

The trusts are also looking to replace more than 400 additional clinical systems at CUH and 150 at Papworth. Meanwhile, CUH plans to switch to VMware virtual desktops during 2012 to enable an access 'anywhere, any device at any time' service. The deployment will lower the cost of its end user computing and free-up clinical staff so that they can spend more time with patients and boost their current 95% satisfaction rating in patient surveys.

Howe concludes:

“ Every member of staff will access to the information they need when they need it, without having to look for a piece of paper, waiting to use a computer, logging in and out of separate IT systems, or asking the patient yet again. Staff will be able to see a unified view of the patient's profile - whether it is clinical, administrative or management information they are looking for. ”