SCC achieves NHS cloud first

Deal with Mersey Care NHS Trust will save 15 per cent of IT budget and hits green agenda to boot

Integrator SCC’s £25m cloud services investment is paying off as the Birmingham-based firm signed a multi-million pound deal with Mersey Care NHS Trust to deliver the UK’s first healthcare cloud.

The five-year contract - awarded after a stringent tender process - involves migrating Mersey Care NHS Trust’s operational data and ICT infrastructure to SCC’s OptimiseCloud platform over the coming six months.

It is the first project to emerge following a framework agreement signed earlier this summer between SCC and Informatics Merseyside - a shared NHS IT service hosted by Mersey Care NHS Trust – to deliver a cloud framework giving customers in the North West access to a range of secure services without having to invest in, maintain or upgrade their own on-site datacentres and servers.

Under this part of the deal, 15 terabytes of data that is stored on Mersey Care NHS Trust’s 90 in-house servers will start to be transferred to SCC’s datacentre from next month. Transfer is expected to be completed in April.

Kelvin Ayre, SCC sales director for Public Sector Cloud, told CRN the deal was the first of its kind in the UK. “In terms of being a cloud delivered, secure service, this is the first time it has been done in the UK," he said. "It is also delivered via a cloud that sits in the UK, and not offshore, which is in line with government regulatory requirements.”

Neil Smith, director of finance at Mersey Care NHS Trust, said: “After an extensive review, the business case for moving to a cloud-based platform was compelling, offering significant savings over the alternative options we considered.

“Budgetary issues are not the only factor behind the decision, as quality and security are as important to Mersey Care. The move to the cloud offers a number of benefits including a more flexible infrastructure capable of responding to the organisation’s changing IT needs, freeing up the technical services IT resource to work on application developments and other service delivery projects.”

Dympna Wilson, head of service delivery for Informatics Merseyside, told CRN: “We had an idea for a 21st century infrastructure, but were looking at it from a slightly different angle. We wanted to free up resources to develop applications that deliver better at the front end and impact patient care.

“We all know that within the healthcare arena our costs are being squeezed, and to keep refreshing [in-house servers] every two to three years was expensive. Plus we wanted to reduce clinical risk.

“What has been really good for us is working with the trust to look at what the costs are. And with it being a utility style model, it allows us to be very transparent with our costs and only pay for what we actually use.”

Wilson said the deal was positive from a green IT perspective as well. “This also hits the button with the green agenda as well," she said. "Our trust will see a carbon reduction from 180 tonnes per year to carbon neutral, as a result of this deal.”