Look at businesses that have been in operation for 20 years or more and you’ll find a few similarities. One of them will certainly be innovation – the power to come up with new answers for customers’ changing requirements. Advanced Health & Care (Advanced) has been in business for more than two decades, and through innovation and acquisition has done just that for its UK healthcare customers.
The company has seen major developments in healthcare services in the UK, not least around out-of hours and unscheduled healthcare provision including mobile access to patient data. The sector’s attitude to IT has also changed, with many providers now looking to outsource IT to hosted services to reduce spend.
Many of Advanced’s services are underpinned by two active-active data centres. With high-speed links between the two, they act like one data centre complete with failover and high resilience. Ben Cullen, Chief Information Officer for Advanced Health & Care, says: “Our IT strategy has been to work with providers that understand the healthcare sector and offer solutions with the same stability and flexibility we need to deliver an excellent service to our customers. From the beginning, Dell has shown it offers the technology and expertise to support organisations such as Advanced. It’s our IT partner and trusted adviser.”
With 20 years’ cooperation, Advanced and Dell have perfected their way of working, focusing on close collaboration at a technical and account-team level, and regular meetings to discuss the Dell roadmap.
Advanced has used multiple generations of solutions such as Dell PowerEdge servers to enable its products. Cullen adds: “Over recent years, we have seen the Dell portfolio expand to cover all of our IT requirements.”
By investing in Dell Networking, Advanced is preparing its data centre for the next phrase of its growth. The solution includes an upgrade to 10GB networking. It was essential that the routes to the multiple backend database servers and the associated tasks that they performed replication and interoperability with other NHS systems remained as fast as possible.
This was necessary even though Advanced was adding more users, connections and databases to the infrastructure every week. Advanced was already seeing heavy loading on occasion over the existing 1GB solution and knew it had to increase performance. This would also be a logical time to review the architecture and ensure any new solution was designed for optimum deployment and embraced latest best practice.
The Dell solution was chosen because of its scalability and cost effectiveness, as well as the design consultancy deployment and ongoing support that Dell could provide. When Advanced adopts Dell KACE Appliances it will follow a tried-and-tested process. “We engage with Dell training services when we start working with a solution for the first time,” comments Cullen. “This way, the IT team gains a great insight into the technology and can start working with the solutions with confidence from day one.
“Our IT personnel take what they’ve learnt and then apply it to Dell solutions with the support of the Dell Deployment Services team. It saves time and helps maximise the effectiveness of our IT investments.”
Dell and its partners can deliver tailored solutions for effective IT improvements in any organisation. Read more customer success stories here, and find your own Dell technology provider by visiting the Find a Partner page here.
The post End-to-end solution from Dell helps healthcare company to innovate appeared first on Tech Page One.