Mersey Care invests in cloud

Mersey Care NHS Trust has signed a five-year deal with SCC to deliver its healthcare cloud.

The contract will see Mersey Care NHS Trusts operational data and ICT infrastructure migrate to SCC’s OptimiseCloud platform over the next six months.

Fifteen terabytes of data currently stored on the trust’s 90 in-house servers will be transferred to the company’s £25 million data centre from February.

Informatics Merseyside – a shared NHS IT service hosted by Mersey Care NHS Trust – signed a framework agreement with SCC in May. This allowed individual members to sign a call-off contract when they wanted to move to the cloud service.

The health informatics service said at the time that it was hoping to deliver a minimum 15% saving on IT spend for its customers using cloud computing.

Mersey Care is the first customer to sign a call off contract and begin project initiation.

The framework agreement covers a wide range of applications including patient administration services, email provision, share point and business intelligence systems and customers pay for what they use.

Mersey Care Trust director of finance Neil Smith said: “After an extensive review, the business case for moving to a cloud-based platform was compelling, offering significant savings over the alternative options we considered.

“The move to the cloud offers a number of benefits including a more flexible infrastructure capable of responding to the organisation’s changing IT needs, freeing up the technical services IT resource to work on application developments and other service delivery projects.’’

Informatics Merseyside director Mark Bostock said the cloud service means there is no need to have multiple data centres and on-site servers.

“Additionally, customers can scale up or down very quickly according to their needs at any one time,” he said.

“If customers only want to do something on a short term basis they can as they only pay for what they use. “

SCC’s UK public sector director Tracy Westall described the partnership with Informatics Merseyside as a “really important breakthrough in the move towards greater use of cloud services in the UK public sector.”