Solution offered for network performance issues

Networking specialist, Cisco Systems, says it may have a solution to some of the network performance issues experienced by GP practices and has already significantly cut response times in pilot areas.

The solution addresses problems reported by some GPs since the new NHS network, N3, rolled out. Connecting for Health’s experts are adamant that the N3 network is fine and local configuration issues are the cause.

Cisco emphasises that its product, a content acceleration solution, is not related to N3 and that the solution has been seen to provide improvement on wide area links outside of the N3 contract, as well as on N3 links.

Terry Espiner, Cisco’s regional sales manager for healthcare, said the company’s Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software could make a big difference to performance for some practices and primary care trusts.

He told EHI Primary Care: “We have been working with half a dozen PCTs and in one case where there were problems with a link between the GP practice and the branch surgery our solution reduced the response time from one minute 50 seconds to 10 seconds.”

WAAS enables trusts and other organisations to consolidate data into central data silos by accelerating network traffic over great distances. This provides the same performance levels of a local area network over a wide-area-network, for example over multiple sites, via the internet.

Espiner added: “I am of the opinion that some of the performance issues that are being reported could potentially be drastically improved with this.”

Selby and York PCT is among those that have been working with Cisco. Sue Rushbrook, head of IT, said the PCT decided to try Cisco’s WAAS solution after problems with two practices which had merged and where traffic over the link had increased significantly. Rushbrook said most of the traffic was going over the PCT’s Community Wide Area Network rather than N3 as use of national Connecting for Health applications is currently low in Selby and York.

She said: “The log in time dropped from 90 to 100 seconds to about 5 seconds. The practices involved used to be on the phone every day complaining about performance but we don’t hear from them now.”

Espiner said it was impossible to put a price on the cost of the solution as it depended on individual circumstances but claimed it would be much cheaper than buying additional bandwidth.

Since last year GPs have been complaining of problems with poor performance of their systems included slowness experienced while using Choose and Book or browsing for resources on the internet, difficulties opening scanned documents particularly at branch surgeries and reductions in the speed of clinical systems when information has to be checked via N3.

Most GP practices currently have a 1MB uncontended connection but N3 provider BT is piloting a 8MB DSL rate adaptive service which they believe may be suitable for many surgeries.

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