Providing Reliable IT Services to Medical Professionals in 2022: Service Delivery Considerations

5 Things that can be done to help NHS Service delivery 

The good news is, it’s certainly not all doom and gloom. There are solutions that can be implemented to relieve the pressure, enable proactiveness and increase efficiency, allowing IT teams to enjoy the benefits that come with these changes.

Asset discovery

A key aspect of running a well-oiled machine is knowing all of its parts. IT service delivery is no different. 

Gaining visibility and an understanding of the different components in your network, their health, status, relationships, and behaviours provides the foundations of planning. 

Depending on the main driver behind this solution, there are various vendors you could review:

• If an asset discovery project is purely designed to provide the basis for service delivery, then you could look at a modular ITSM solution that you can grow into as your service delivery operation develops, such as Helix by BMC which provides the starting blocks for intelligent service management through asset discovery. The introduction of Service Models is a powerful tool to start visualising the components that comprise your complex services.
• If the need to discover these assets is driven by device performance concerns or general performance concerns, then looking at a digital experience product like Riverbed Aternity could be worthwhile.
• If cyber concerns are the driver behind understanding what assets are in your network and how they are behaving, then there are solutions on the market that are more tailored to this, such as Armis for OT security, IoT concerns, and unmanaged medical devices.

It is worth mentioning, that if your organisation’s unique use case matches our examples above, it doesn’t mean you need to solve one business problem with a given solution. Having a clear asset management strategy for example, ensures that the outputs from these kinds of tools can enhance your existing Asset and CMDB solutions through integration.

Visibility into end-user experience (EUX) performance metrics

Getting visibility into how IT is consumed is the starting point for taking a proactive approach in improving service levels. 

Of course, it’s important to have visibility into more granular details such as the performance of individual applications but having a bird’s eye view of service delivery through the network to the end-user and having real-time analytics into their click to render time, provides useful insight. 

Having a broader view of where service delivery issues are occurring and how they are impacting the end-user, allows decisions to be made, prioritised, and executed based on data. Further to this, it speeds up investigations and helps understand the breadth and depth of a problem quickly - enabling correct resource allocation of resources to solve the problem. 

What are the tangible benefits of implementing an end-user experience solution? 

• Proactive Improvement of service delivery through data analytical decision making
• Reduction in service desk tickets as a result of the above
• Reduction of stress and burnout for IT staff

Another benefit is the ability to have cross-boundary visibility. When parts of your estate are third-party managed or hosted environments, it's important to be able to see if they are delivering what they say they are and be able to hold them accountable if they aren’t. 

Implement automation of repetitive tasks 

We have highlighted the impact of NHS IT teams getting distracted by time-consuming, repetitive, and error-prone manual tasks, which pulls them away from driving IT strategy.
Having the ability to automate some of these tasks and reduce the manual hours, brings with it a host of benefits that can be shared across the NHS: 

• Improved service efficiency and productivity
• Spending less time on manual tasks and focussing on service improvements is a much better use of time for skilled IT professionals, whilst pushing the quality of service in the right direction.
• Remove errors
• When a task or workflow is repeated regularly, automation removes the element of human error, meaning standardised process, getting the same result every time.
   
• Improve health and performance of IT staff
• In a recent Government survey (2021) it was identified that 92% of trusts told NHS Providers they had concerns about staff wellbeing due to burnout. This, of course, is experienced by IT teams too, and as with any NHS employee, the impact of being burnt out and not being able to do your job effectively has a direct impact on patient care, as well as their health (both mental and physical) and general well being. 

Ensure the system is up to the task

When visibility into these key areas is achieved and the picture is more complete, it should become clearer where funding needs to be spent.

With this knowledge, building business cases for solutions that are actively going to improve service delivery, patient care and giving medical, clinical, and support staff the tools they need to conduct their job to the best of their ability, should be easier. 

IT service delivery is about ensuring that the needs of the patients and those delivering their care are met, information can be shared and accessed on-demand and medical devices are available when needed.

It is impossible to do this without the right visibility, processes, technology, and people in place.

Buy together - Cost optimisation 

A common theme we have seen from our work in the NHS, is tool overlapping mostly due to end of budget panic buying or buying without a clear understanding of the situation, adding to the problem of complexity and wasting budget in the process.

By adopting more shared services and addressing the problems of the many (which are likely to be closely linked) rather than the few or one, benefits can be obtained:

• Increase buying power - when buying a vendor solution, the larger the order, the more can be negotiated for the money, providing a better budget spend and more capability.
• Reduce complexity - We’ve discussed the problems of complexity, but by having fewer solutions in the ecosystem and sharing one solution to do a few jobs, you’re easing the complexity, making management and maintenance easier.
• Enterprise alignment - This builds on the points raised above, for organisations that want and may even need to align, more commonality between Process, People, Organisation and Technology ensures that integration complexity and ambiguity is reduced. This allows teams to focus on exploitation, instead of alignment of architectures, data models, processes, etc.