East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) provides hospital and community health services for a population of almost a million in the Colchester and Ipswich area. It has over 12,000 employees, 22 sites including 2 acute hospitals, 6 community hospitals and a number of specialist clinics. Its core vision is ‘Time matters for patients’.
When Colchester and Ipswich hospitals merged, from an IT perspective, the trust inherited two of everything; separate networks, data centres, security policies and two internet service providers spanning different areas, all of which created huge complexity.
Rather than making incremental changes, ESNEFT recognised that only a complete transformation could ensure a consistent digital experience across all its 22 sites, both large and small. For staff working in the community, it wanted to provide the same experience; secure, reliable access to data.
It wanted to modernise and future-proof IT capabilities, ESNEFT needed a network that could deliver the performance and reliability to support the long-term digital strategy. A business case was successfully presented to leadership, securing the investment needed to overhaul the entire IT environment.
When we were planning to centralise and modernise the network we wanted to go best of breed, and Fortinet’s SD-WAN was the clear winner. We wanted a partner who could maintain our network and help with patching but also enable us to implement quick changes so we could stay agile. Choosing Redcentric as our partner has been one of the best decisions we have ever made.
ESNEFT wanted a trusted partner who understood the critical importance of the NHS environment. It needed a safe pair of hands who they could rely on to design and then successfully deploy a solution across their 22 sites ensuring there was no disruption to patient care.
Specifically, it needed to address the following challenges:
As part of its digital strategy ESNEFT also wanted to consolidate the two EPR systems it had inherited at the time of the merger and replace with a single, next generation EPR which would transform how clinicians could record patient observations and retrieve records and have a huge positive impact on patient care.
It needed to host infrastructure for the new EPR which ensured that the performance and security requirements could be met so that all healthcare teams had reliable access.
Redcentric met with ESNEFT to understand its challenges. Working closely alongside the ESNEFT IT Architecture team, it scoped out, designed and delivered a modern network which could be co-managed thereby allowing simple network changes to be implemented by ESNEFT, while Redcentric handled more complex changes.
The network solution included:
Following on from the network deployment, it was an obvious decision for the ESNEFT EPR Design team to select Redcentric to host our EPR estate and we are supported in real time.
Building on its knowledge of ESNEFT’s environment, Redcentric provided resilient data centre connectivity and a dedicated ExpressRoute connection to Microsoft Azure which enabled seamless access to applications.
We sat down with Redcentric and Fortinet and very early on they quickly understood our problems and what we needed. We didn’t need to explain, they already understood. Redcentric’s track record, its knowledge of the NHS and its relationships with NHS England and Fortinet meant we were confident it could both design and deliver the new network.
SD-WAN is efficient and gives us the ability to respond quickly and do whatever we need to do. It gives us confidence because we can see every aspect of our network from end to end.
The level of professionalism from scoping, to architecting a solution and right through the build was consistently high. The technical expertise of Redcentric’s people filled you with confidence and we’ve been impressed with the support and the open and honest relationships we have which has built trust. We didn’t just want a quick fix. This was about ensuring we had an IT foundation that could scale, evolve and support the trust’s digital future. Redcentric worked alongside us to make sure everything was designed with that in mind.
With a fully modernised and scalable IT environment, ESNEFT now has IT infrastructure that supports both current and future digital initiatives. The trust benefits from smarter, more agile networking which has created cost-efficiencies and simplified management, allowing IT teams to focus on supporting frontline services.
The investment has strengthened data security, increased network resilience, and ensured the trust is well-positioned for continued innovation. The new EPR, a critical milestone in improving access to patient data to improve decision-making, is now fully supported by a high-performance, always-on network, ensuring clinicians can access patient records without delay.
The Deputy Associate Director commented,
With Redcentric’s support, we’ve built an infrastructure that not only meets today’s needs but ensures we are ready for the future. Having the right technology in place means we can be confident, and we can focus on delivering better care for patients.
