Dedalus migrates NHS EPR customers to the cloud

Dedalus has moved six of its NHS EPR customers to the cloud – with a further 14 NHS trusts set to migrate and go live by the autumn.

Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust was the first NHS trust to go live, with Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust; University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust; Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust; East Suffolk & North Essex NHS Foundation Trust; and South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust also now live on the platform.

The move to Dedalus’ Healthcare Platform means reduced complexity and risk, while data and applications remain available at any time.

The platform is hosted on Amazon Public Cloud and leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Computing Services and AWS Managed Services (AMS). Common shared services on the platform include remote access, deployment automation, network security and monitoring.

The trusts already gone live are now benefitting from the ability to flex and tailor their data processing power at a local trust level.

The move to the cloud has also impacted on disaster recovery testing and the adoption of security patches, as no outages are required to support them. The result is that the NHS trust can deliver a service focused on improved performance, new capabilities and an enhanced layer of security. Global surveillance centre services bolster resilience and security, while there’s an additional layer of security at trust and data centre level.

Colin Henderson, regional general manager, Dedalus, UK and Ireland, acknowledged the role cloud computing has in the future of healthcare: “It provides proven and easily accessible capabilities, increasing the pace of innovation and unlocking the potential of health data.  Importantly, the system performance stats in our migrated clients have been very favourable as speed of access to information is so critical.”

Lee Rickles, CIO, Yorkshire & Humber care record programme director, who were the first trust to migrate, added: “There are a wealth of benefits that come from moving applications to the cloud, we are seeing reduced costs, better security and reliability, as well as greater flexibility, performance, scalability and availability. The migration has been collaborative across the Trust partnering with Dedalus, with minimal disruption.”

Dedalus recently bought DXC Technology’s health business for £413m, making it Europe’s largest healthcare IT firm.

Henderson continued: “Cloud computing unlocks many more possibilities for data-driven care as we move into an era that is beyond the traditional EPR, utilising open standards to share information readily. It is much more dynamic as we don’t have the usual supply chain lead times for provisioning hardware.”