Member Article

Liverpool hospital appoints AIMES Grid Services

Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has appointed AIMES Grid Services to supply disaster recovery and colocation services as part of a five-year plan.

The data centre operator and cloud computing firm will provide support as part of a strategy where they will host business and mission critical applications within what they called a “hybrid cloud”.

AIMES will install electronic patient records (EPR) at the hospital, in what the NHS Trust called a “major step” towards giving better service to patients and their families by digitising paper records.

The EPR system will be operated from Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital’s main site in Broadgreen and AIMES’ Kilby House data centre to ensure its resilience.

Dave Murphy, Head of IT, Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: “AIMES presented us with a highly compelling business case that has basically made it cost-neutral for us to replicate our EPR system and business applications into the cloud.

“The EPR programme represents a major opportunity for us to improve our patient experience and quality of care.

“As an IT department, the challenge, therefore, is ensuring the availability and resiliency of a system which will be accessed by around 1000 users every day.

“We must provide solutions that our clinicians and front line staff have absolute confidence in, with guaranteed availability and performance. We are confident that we can do this now that we have AIMES on board as a partner.”

The hospital found AIMES through the Government’s G-Cloud procurement framework, which pre-approves providers to speed up the tendering process.

Glenn Roberts, business development manager at AIMES Grid Services commented: “We’re delighted to be supporting Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital in what will be one of the first EPR implementations in the UK.

“Winning this project in a competitive UK market is further evidence of the compelling proposition that our Kilby House data centre offers. This, along with our G-Cloud supplier status, is really enabling us to build a presence within the NHS.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .