North Staffs COINs in savings

North Staffordshire’s community of interest network is expanding to include another 38 GPs and has reduced overall network spend by about £100,000 a year.

The new service, built by Updata Infrastructure, provides IT services to a combined trust, primary care trust and more than 100 GPs.Another ten sites have already been added to the original COIN and a further 38 GPs have recently signed up.

North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust network and systems manager Richard McCue said he hoped to get emerging clinical commissioning groups on the COIN as it could deliver services that were not available when relying on N3.

Updata said more than 100 sites were connected in the first six months of the project – launched in May last year – using a mixture of connectivity methods including ADSL, ethernet in the first mile (EFM) and Fibre.

Provisioning times for EFM connections were reduced from 90 to 20 days and installation costs for new sites fell by up to 80%, the company said. Overall, the network spend has been cut by about £100,000 per year.

McCue said the first stage of the project was to bring the 2Mbps ADSL sites onto the COIN with 99 sites completed by mid-October 2011.

The inclusion of three primary care centres is well underway, with two former PCTs – NHS North Staffordshire and NHS Stoke on Trent – now able to share X-Ray and PACS data properly.

“We could do this on the old service,” explained McCue. “But the network didn’t have enough bandwidth on the core according to PACS guidelines, so it was inefficient and to a certain extent, obsolete.”

The COIN was also being used as a backbone to get users onto the N3 network and users could access central services on N3 such as Choose and Book, he added.

“We’re looking at GP consortia and services we can deliver to them that aren’t available if you rely purely on N3,” said McCue.

“We are hoping that this COIN will enable us to work closer with our colleagues in South Staffordshire, and form better physical and metaphorical connections.”

“We have also had interest from some smaller local councils, who might be interested in sharing the investment and connecting-in.”