Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals (RLBUH), part of the UK's NHS, is one of the largest and busiest hospital trusts in the north of England. With an annual budget of over £400m and 5,600 direct staff, the hospitals serve over 800,000 patients per annum.
The RLBUH has a number of critical strategic objectives including the provision of excellence in patient care, as well as the achievement of cost efficiencies to drive the development of additional infrastructure.
"IT is seen as the key enabler in supporting our clinical objectives," says James Norman, director of information management and technology at RLBUH. "The hospital is faced with decreasing funds, and our task is to search for efficiencies while also looking at new markets we can move into."
Norman notes that next-generation IT solutions can ensure that patients' journeys are tracked as they move through stages of hospital care, with the objective of delivering the right treatment at the right time.
"Patient stays can be minimized. The quicker we can get a patient out of the hospital, the better it is for the patient," he says. "IT can also deliver efficiencies. We are setting out to build a new hospital as part of a Public Finance Initiative. We need to build up our financial reserves to contribute to that build. Our IT projects, and the search for cost efficiencies and savings, are key enablers to yield such savings."
Digitization of a variety of patient-related information including charts and medical images was resulting in the significant growth of stored data.
"When we analyzed our data storage numbers, we found that we had a 52 percent growth rate year on year," Norman explains.
"We knew that our storage requirements would continue to grow as we manage structured and unstructured patient information coming in the form of documents, images, and media. Everything is going digital. For instance, we plan to scan all of our health records and also have the CSC/CareFX Clinical Portal. The imaging and electronic data capture will result in a storage requirement that will be huge."
Norman and his team sought a new storage solution that was strategic rather than incremental to help enable patient care collaboration and cloud-enabled services. They wanted a sound investment that would be future-proofed through scalable technologies; resulting in much higher returns on investment while also yielding high performance to deliver outstanding patient services.
Norman examined a variety of solutions including HP, NetApp, and the next-generation EMC® storage solution, EMC VMAX™. "We started looking at EMC VMAX, and the key deciding factors were performance and scalability. HP and NetApp offerings were very good, but in tests did not give the performance we needed, and would have ended up essentially as very expensive file servers," he says. "We could have quite easily uploaded our files onto these, but we would have seen a gentle decline in data performance."
Having considered the alternatives, the RLBUH made the decision to purchase two EMC VMAX enterprise storage platforms. "We went with EMC VMAX due to its high performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness," states Norman.
Norman also looked carefully at the numbers when making his decision to purchase EMC VMAX. "We looked at what our cost of storage would be moving forward, and we compared that with the cost of buying VMAX," he explains. "Over a five year period, it was much more cost effective to go with VMAX than it was to buy individual SANs to meet our growth needs.
"We also looked at the physical size of the infrastructure and what it required from our data center," says Norman. We are going to consolidate three of our existing HP SANs into the new VMAX systems. That will result in a significant savings in electricity and cooling for the data centers, as well as a savings in maintenance costs.
"These are quite significant savings, so VMAX virtually pays for itself by bringing it in. The savings offered by using VMAX systems is allowing more of the budget to be put toward the trust's other projects."
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