Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust implements Private Cloud

RCHT provides healthcare services across the UK county of Cornwall serving more than 530,000 residents, and often twice that number during peak holiday seasons. The Trust employs around 5,000 staff and is responsible for three hospitals in the region, incorporating 750 beds in total across Truro, Penzance and Hayle.

 

With its hospitals providing vital patient care every day of the year, RCHT must have rapid, constant access to clinical data and applications across all of its locations. Faced with ever-growing volumes of patient data, the Trust found itself constrained by the limitations of its existing IT infrastructure and was experiencing poor system performance and even outages.

 

With incumbent technology unable to scale to meet the growing demand, RCHT sought a new infrastructure solution to address both current performance requirements and long-term strategic goals, including implementing a number of ambitious new clinical applications and achieving greater integration with Cornwall Council to join health and social services for the local community.

 

The Trust’s current storage estate comprises around 70TB with two major projects in the pipeline driving data growth: digitising patient records and clinical imaging. Both projects have data intensive workloads and explicit retention periods over the course of a patient’s lifetime. For RCHT it was essential to have a solution that allowed future growth, as well as intelligent tiering to reduce costs.

 

Hitachi Data Systems worked closely with its partner, XMA, throughout the competitive pitch process against four other vendors. The winning solution was a private cloud environment based on Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Pro across two data centres, providing support for VMware and containing Hitachi Unified Storage VM and Hitachi Content Platform technologies promising to make RCHT’s clinical and non-clinical IT environment more agile, reliable and highly available. Hitachi UCP Director automation software was also implemented to help increase day-to-day operational efficiencies, allowing the network to be managed seamlessly across hospitals.

 

The enhanced system performance and scale of the new solution has allowed the Trust to support not only its three acute hospitals with storage, compute and networking infrastructure, but also serve the needs of 12 community hospitals throughout Cornwall, numerous community healthcare providers including midwives, occupational therapists and physiotherapists, and network support for over eighteen general practitioner practices. The Trust also provides support for over 10,000 end-user devices across Cornwall.

 

As a result of the implementation, clinical users will see an immediate step forward in performance, making it easier to access the data they need and allow them to focus on patient care. With an improved hosting solution for a modern healthcare environment removing the technical constraints on upgrading the Trust’s portfolio of clinical applications, RCHT can now firmly focus on improving services and the patient experience for the residents of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and visitors alike.

 

“We had no prior experience of working with Hitachi Data Systems, but the transformative power of the solution and professional execution impressed us. The solution will enable us to meet both present and future technical requirements and represents the beginning of our transformation journey,” said Paul Hayes, technical services manager, Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust.

 

“We’re delighted to have been chosen as Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust’s strategic technology partner going forwards and this is Hitachi Data Systems’ first win with a leading UK hospital trust. We look forward to working with the Trust on their ongoing digital transformation to continue to innovate and provide outstanding patient care,” said Richard Gadd, managing director, Hitachi Data Systems, UK and Ireland.