Client Story
A journey to digital transformation supported by Altera Digital Health Technical Services
The trust went live with Sunrise in 2016 and is in the process of upgrading to 22.1, the most recent version of Sunrise. In November 2019, it became the first NHS organisation to open a digital experience centre with Altera Digital Health, on the site of the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary in Wigan.
Just a few weeks earlier, in September 2019, it signed a contract with Altera Digital Health Technical Services. Martyn Smith, Associate Director of IM&T, explains why: “We were facing three big challenges,” he says.
“First, we realised that our team was not big enough to guarantee that services would be available 24/7/365. We had lots of single points of failure, and it was never going to be economical to double and triple up, even if we could find the skilled people we needed.
“Second, expectations were being put on us to deliver more and more clinical functionality for our hospitals, and those expectations were getting close to outstripping our ability to deliver.
“And third, we had been talking to the Altera team about some of the work that Sunrise customers had been doing in North America. We were keen to bring some of that to Wigan, but we just didn’t have the resources. So, we decided that we needed Altera Digital Health to take on some of the load.”
In 2022, WWL agreed a Technical Support Services contract. The contract includes additional services, including implementation of the Sunrise™ Business Continuity Service, which provides a familiar EPR view of clinical records accessed through a web browser.
Developed a Health Information System, or HIS, using Sunrise
Opened the Altera Digital Health Digital Experience Centre at the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary in November 2019
Contract signed with Altera Digital Health Technical Services in September 2019 and renewed its contract in 2022
A gold standard of Technical Services
Altera Technical Services is one of the largest business units in Altera. It has a global team of 2,100 people, of whom around 200 are clinical professionals. It provides 24/7/365 monitoring of systems, so it can respond to any issues that clients have, often before they know they have them.
Steve Pusey, Senior Manager, Technical Support Services, has been delighted with the relationship that the Altera Technical Support Services teams have built with the trust. Steve said, “Clinical staff and patient safety are dependent on 24x7 access to the Altera clinical solutions. If a solution is not available, even for a small number of minutes, this causes severe disruption to the trust.
“The Altera Technical Support Services team supplements the Trust’s teams by working in partnership. Altera provides 24x7 pro-active monitoring with automated alerts covering infrastructure, servers, storage, databases, services, networking and integration. Whatever the time of day when a monitoring alert is received the Altera team immediately investigates and resolves, in most cases before the end users are aware that there has been an issue.
“The technical support services we provide is not just restricted to Altera solutions.
At WWL we also provide technical support services, including pro-active monitoring/alerts over the trust Integration Engine (Rhapsody), and other trust applications.
We manage the trust’s integration engine, Rhapsody, and when there are issues with interfaces out-of-hours we can intervene to make sure that all the communications between solutions across the trust are up and running. In terms of the database, we manage all of the administration, all of the security, tuning, capacity forecasting and issue resolution.”
Moving quickly during COVID-19
In addition to its business-as-usual contract WWL, Wigan and Leigh has a “bucket” of hours with Altera Technical Services that it can call off against work that it needs done quickly, which was useful in February 2020 as COVID-19 arrived in the UK.
WWL realised it would not have the capacity to treat COVID-19 patients using its existing hospital estate, so it ran a six-week project to create a modular ward in what had been a bus stop and car park outside the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary.
At the time, Bryn Ward had 50 beds and 27 intensive care spaces, and the trust wanted it equipped with blood gas analysers. These test patients’ oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, so clinicians can determine how well their lungs are working. The Trust wanted the results to be quickly and easily available in Sunrise, as part of the patient record, and Altera Technical Services carried out the work.
Martyn Smith explains, “To address the COVID-19 pandemic, we needed to buy and deploy blood gas analysers very rapidly. We wanted to see the results in Sunrise, so we worked with Steve’s team to do that. They did a great piece of work that made a real difference at a very pressured time.”
Laying the foundations with a three-month transition
Altera Technical Services moved quickly once its initial contract was signed with WWL. Pusey explains, “We had a kickoff meeting at the Trust in November 2019, and then we had a transition period that ran for three months. During that time, we brought our technical experts in, and they sat down with their team and reviewed all the systems and standard operating procedures and agreed how the service would be implemented.”
Joseph Boyce, Area VP Managed Services, stressed that Altera Technical Services did not wait until the end of the transition period to start work. “We started delivering and that had an immediate impact on the capacity and capability that the trust was able to express,” he said.
Boyce added, “We did not take away any resources from the trust. No jobs were lost. What we did was allow the trust to take a breath and start looking at its high-level strategies and the deployments it wanted to do and the projects that it wanted to run across its applications.”
Support for a big Sunrise upgrade
One of the system improvements that WWL made was to move from Sunrise 15.3 to Sunrise 18.4. “Steve and his team supported us on the upgrade, which was challenging to run in the middle of COVID,” says Martyn Smith. The trust is now working with Altera to upgrade to Sunrise 22.1.
Looking ahead to a strategic partnership
Martyn Smith concludes by saying that WWL is pleased with the support provided by Altera and the technical services team. “We are glad we are on this journey with the technical services team,” he says.
“They are taking ownership and working on problems with us, and we know that we have access to a multi-disciplinary team globally to deliver solutions for us, which is going to be fantastic. That will mean that we can focus on organisational demands. So we are looking forward to working with them in a strategic way and not just an operational way.”
Steve Pusey commented, “It is very heartening to me that WWL has recently expanded the services to, for example, include our Business Continuity Service. I look forward to continuing to work in partnership with WWL and our other UK partners.”
Related Insights
