NHSBT - Brochure 2016

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Putting digital at the heart

Putting digital at the heart

Written by Lucy Dixon Produced by Andrew Lloyd

For NHS Blood and Transplant, digital is at the heart of everything it does, from its customer-facing website and blood donor portal, to the ways that transplant surgeons receive information and make decisions

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HS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) facilitates donation and transplantation across the whole of the UK and also manages the supply of blood and tissues, as well as a range of specialist blood testing, for England. And, as Chief Digital Officer Aaron Powell explains, technology is making an incredible impact on the work it does, ultimately improving patient outcomes and saving lives. “What we’re doing has a direct impact in saving and improving people’s lives. It’s what we’re about as an organisation.

Whether it’s providing services to blood donors that enable them to make appointments to come and give blood or providing services that allow us to accurately and efficiently allocate the precious gifts that people donate to us to the right patient, my

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job is to make sure the technology services that we offer are resilient and robust to enable the team to do the best possible job that they can do.”

Powell’s appointment as CDO for NHSBT in 2015 coincided with the organisation’s shift towards a more digital operation. “My appointment heralded the beginning of a real focus on digital and what digital can mean for what we do as a blood and transplant organisation,” he explains.

“We had already started to explore digital opportunities but, in line with many public sector organisations, we’d focused initially on our customerfacing activity.” So the website and portals for potential blood donors were already developed, making the next step thinking about what NHSBT might do differently as an organisation if it was able to take

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www.scc.com

Driving Digital Transformation NHS Blood and Transplant has partnered with SCC, Europe’s largest independent IT services business, and HP Inc., to deliver innovation in a way that will change healthcare.

SCC and HP Inc.: Driving digital transformation with NHS Blood and Transplant

NHS Blood and Transplant delivers an essential service, saving lives on a daily basis.

At any given time, NHSBT employees need visibility of exactly where blood products are, exactly where they’ve been and exactly who they’ve gone to, so it is critical that allows them to access this information in a timely manner.

With a view to become asset-free in the next 3-5 years, NHSBT recently underwent a large scale transformational project to move away from their legacy infrastructure and begin transitioning services into the cloud.

To support this, SCC, Europe’s largest independent IT solutions provider, teamed up with HP Inc. to design and execute a solution to refresh their desktop estate and provide futureproof technology to support desktop modernisation.

The introduction of HP Elite 1012 devices between tablet and laptop mode, allowing them to securely access information and applications from the cloud, even when on the move.

Using HP’s T630 thin client devices, NHSBT employees can now connect to SCC’s secure cloud network to remotely access their desktop applications from any device. This increased business mobility infrastructure.

The whole project is funded using SCC’s

Following a successful hardware rollout, SCC provides ongoing managed services, with teams of HP accredited device experts on hand to provide maintenance to all NHSBT sites across the UK and 24x7 support from SCC’s award winning customer service centre.

The 30 year partnership between SCC and HP Inc. combines SCC’s end to end technology solutions and secure cloud services, with industry-leading HP devices to provide NHSBT with the technology they need to support the delivery of services which save lives.

total cost of ownership. Flex Start consolidating all invoices for purchased equipment into one predictable quarterly statement, reducing administration and making it easier to audit.

HP Elite x2 1012 G1

People do business. We make it work.

Plan | Supply | Integrate | Manage

full advantage of the capabilities that digital technologies provide.

NHSBT enables over 4,000 transplants to occur across the UK every year and has over one million blood donors registered to book appointments via the organisation’s online portal. It processes around 6,000 units of blood every day, supplying 200 hospital trusts in England with essential blood for surgery, trauma and blood

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transfusions. “We maintain a regular supply of blood across the country and then we have a diagnostic and therapeutic services division, which is an essential collection of business units, providing specialised testing capabilities and therapeutic apheresis services,” Powell adds.

The digital transformation that is now framing everything NHSBT does is all about connectedness and personalisation – focusing on how

it can connect information across the different business units in order to provide a better service. “We’ve been working on understanding what a connected health service and a personalised health service actually means. How we can provide a more joined-up service to people with other parts of the NHS? And how can we ultimately connect that information to someone outside of the health sector, to make sure that the service we’re providing is one that is designed around the needs of individual donors and suits their lifestyle and the way they wish to donate?”

Although Powell describes this as a ‘journey that we’re on rather than a destination we’ve reached’, the work it has carried out on the online blood donor portal has led to over 50 percent of all bookings being made online and a three percent increase in attendance in just two years. “We’re looking at the data, the processes and technology we use to understand how we can connect across NHSBT and beyond in order to rethink the services we offer,” he adds. The donor portal’s primary purpose is to give donors a

We’re looking at the data, the processes and technology we use to understand how we can connect across NHSBT and beyond in order to rethink the services we offer better experience in terms of allowing them to make and view appointments at a time convenient to them, and it has additional benefits for NHSBT. “In terms of our own processing, it has significantly reduced the overhead of management appointment bookings and we have saved around £1.4 million just in terms of the paperwork associated with donor appointments as a consequence,” Powell says.

NHSBT’s technology strategy needed a complete rethink in order to deliver this digital-first approach, says Powell. “Like a lot of organisations we have got very good legacy systems that we have been running for a number of years that were essentially developed in either the late 90s

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Ready means getting blood to patients in time Vodafone Power to you

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It’s no exaggeration to say that our ability to provide hospitals across England and North Wales with the blood they need depends on Vodafone services.

NHS Blood and Transplant

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Our extensive global network, covering more than 150 countries can help your organisation be ready for anything.

We provide the infrastructure backbone across fixed, mobile and cloud that enables digital transformation both in the private and public sector.

It’s this network that enables NHSBT to be more agile, responsive and operate securely.

We partner with award-winning suppliers such as Cisco to provide UK organisations with a fully unified all-in-one communications solution that keeps people connected and supports the delivery of critical services.

See our work with NHS Blood and Transplant here

or early 2000s. Sharing data and standards and open interfaces into processes on these systems has been other applications that are delivered hard so we framed a strategy around to us primarily as SaaS.” This means this – we knew that we needed to do that NHSBT doesn’t need to think technology differently but we hadn’t about the infrastructure and the really thought through how differently technology, but can focus on the so, as a consequence of that, a business functionality and usability. number of our systems were at risk of “We think about how we can leverage becoming unstable and we needed to the technology to save and improve shore them up. So the watch words lives, which is ultimately what we’re around the strategy were about as an organisation.” that we would stabilise, So NHSBT has been protect and migrate the working with SCC existing systems.” closely on this issue of A significant part of operational stability that stabilisation was of its applications, for achieved by securing the future for all of the Number of employees hosting arrangements services it operates. at NHS Blood and SCC data centres that “We also worked Transplant put NHSBT’s systems on with Microsoft quite a sound footing. Powell heavily to explore the adds: “And then we’re looking to possibilities of cloud services and protect those systems by bringing in how we can have those flexible the latest versions of the technologies services that allow us to scale up in that we currently operate as we times of peak activity but also scale migrate them to the new world, down in times of reduced activity as we call it, which is about using and have confidence that those cloud services to provide resilience, services are available and they’re scalable and flexible solutions supported in safe environments, that we can integrate using open with other people worrying about

5,000

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the underlying technology.”

Another crucial partner has been Vodafone, Powell says, which provides all of NHSBT’s connectivity and telephony contracts.

“Our collaboration with Vodafone gives us the network capability to access these services and to access them in a reliable way, and the bandwidth across our network to allow us to access and make heavy use of cloud-based services.”

On the organ donation and transplantation side, NHSBT has started to use the intelligent

computing capabilities of the IBM Business Process Management Solution in order to develop a set of allocation rules. “With this we can change more flexibly over time to respond to clinical needs and clinical practices around organ allocation, to ensure that the maximum number of people have access to organ transplantation as a therapy and we make best use of the organs that are available to us from donors.”

Organ allocation schemes are designed to balance equity and utility – fundamentally to make

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sure that everyone in need has a fair chance of an organ transplant.

When you consider that organs are in short supply, and on average three people still die every day in need of a transplant, it is easy to see that every efficiency allowed by technology can make a difference on the number of lives extended through organ transplantation. “It’s about making sure that we match

the donor organ with the transplant recipient in a way that is safe and will result in a positive outcome to the transplant, but also make sure that the allocation scheme maximises the number of people who will receive a transplant and the number of years that they will live with a donated organ,” Powell adds.

The allocation scheme works behind the scenes in conjunction

Next Generation Digital Transformation T-Impact is NHSBT’s strategic delivery partner for Business Process Automation and Business Rules Management using IBM BPM and ODM. We’re helping to deliver NHSBT’s 2020 transformation strategy by improving the process and efficiency of organ donation and transplantation across the UK. It’s a partnership delivering world-class technology to a vital service, and we’re proud to be a part of it.

See how T-Impact can accelerate your digital transformation journey and deliver up to a 40% uplift in performance and cost efficiency whilst improving customer experience and regulatory compliance. www.t-impact.com | 01235 854044

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The IBM logo and the IBM Member Business Partner mark are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.

with DonorPath, which is an iPad app created for the specialist nurses.

Powell says: “The nurses can collate all the information they need about an organ donor in order to provide information to the transplant surgeons to make a decision about whether or not to accept an organ.

That’s a risk-based decision based upon the factors of the recipient they’re dealing with and the donor.” This transforms 75 pages of paper forms that the nurses fill in into a risk profile that the transplant centres can make a decision on.

“We have another digital service called our Electronic Offering

Service (EOS) which is available to transplant surgeons on a range of mobile devices that gives them the critical information they need in order to make that decision in real time.” And the nature of organ donation and transplantation means these decisions need to be made quickly. Once again, this illustrates how technology – in this case, the processing of information, can make a difference by reducing delays and helping the transplant teams manage the logistics more efficiently.

Powell highlights the multiple benefits his team provides to the wider organisation with its core delivery

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We have another digital service called our Electronic Offering Services which is available to transplant surgeons on a range of mobile devices that gives them the critical information they need in order to make that decision in real time programmes, such as the ODT (organ donation and transplantation) Hub programme. “This is effectively creating a central command and control centre for organ donation and transplantation that uses intelligent technology such as the IBM business process management system to allow us to manage the realtime logistics.” There is also a Core Systems Modernisation programme, which is replacing the traditional blood control systems with an intelligent CRM capability using Dynamics CRM, and a supply chain management capability using Dynamics AX. Another core programme is updating the infrastructure and desktop operating system.

“Balancing how we interact between SCC data centres and Microsoft cloud services, we are relying much more

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on needing connected systems, so we also have a network improvement programme with Vodafone that is looking to improve the bandwidth to all of our sites and all of our locations over the next 12 months,” Powell says, concluding that NHSBT is currently investing more heavily in technology than it has for some time, meaning that this complex organisation is making steady improvements. “The technologies that we’re using allow us to both provide convenience to our donors and to clinicians, and also gives significant overall operational efficiency to NHSBT. Ultimately, it all contributes to what we are about as an organisation – enabling our donors to do something amazing, to save and improve the lives of others” Powell says.

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www.nhsbt.nhs.uk