Healthcare industry fosters innovation thanks to application analytics

Extreme Networks, Inc. says that two healthcare customers are using its Purview network-powered analytics technology. Purview provides visibility into data applications and devices, helping healthcare organisations inform service improvement activities, positively impacting both patients and staff.

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Bart’s Health NHS Trust are using Purview to analyse and improve the availability and performance of life-saving applications, troubleshooting issues before clinicians and patient lives are impacted. With Purview, both customers have gained significant details and more meaningful visibility and control of all the applications running over their mission-critical healthcare networks.

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH)
UCLH is one of the largest NHS Foundation Trusts in the UK. It is implementing a transformation program where innovation in technology will be used to support its ambition for clinical digital services, part of which involves the development and benefit realisation of cross platform technology data analytics to support tactical and strategy decision making.

“We have brought together a range of technology platforms and are working to develop a fully integrated analytical technology stack, including Purview,” said Mark Taglietti, Head of ICT Service Delivery and Vendor Management at UCLH. “This will create a centralised view of end user technology analytics, network analytics and application analytics across the estate.

“The combined system went live in October 2014 and is used to inform a wide range of our service improvement activities across the estate,” continued Taglietti. “The solution enables increased levels of proactive IT management such as identifying issues before they adversely impact users. It also increases security, standardisation, availability, sustainability and enables license monitoring and software usage reporting. By working with our supplier partners, including Extreme Networks and Nexthink we are embracing third party product development and integration, with the sole intent to drive value and deliver improved levels of quality and technical service delivery across UCLH.”

Barts Health NHS Trust
As the largest NHS Trust in the UK, Barts Health manages large multiple campuses across East London and beyond. Its six hospital sites are connected, serving over 56 community centres in the form of GP practices and clinics, 14,000 staff and a total population of 2.5 million. Delivering the best possible end user experience – for patients, doctors, nursing staff, community staff, health visitors, corporate users and academic researchers – is dependent on the Trust’s ability to exchange information and data in real-time across its organisation.

Using Purview, for the first time we now have a full picture of what data is being transferred across our network, to where, and whether it has arrived at its final destination,” said Jason Bincalar, Deputy Director of ICT at Bart’s Health NHS Trust. “We can also identify bottlenecks and specific applications that have speed or performance issues. Purview enables my team to rapidly troubleshoot faults, reducing the impact to our patient activities. This keeps productivity in the organisation high, the end user experience good and our IT costs low”.

Continuing, Bincalar said: “The data we get from Purview also enables us to give priority to certain types of data traffic on our network. We exchange a myriad of clinically rich information, from x-ray images to A&E registrations and patient discharges. This is in addition to organisational data such as the number and location of patients in our hospitals and the typical commercial traffic that you find, which includes email and web browsing. For obvious reasons, it is vital to ensure patient care related information has the priority.”