Using cloud storage to put patient care first
CHRIS MCGARRY IT Director, EMIS
“The nature of our business means that we have a lot of parties to please and if our strict service level agreements are not met our external contracts could be at risk. We had to be absolutely sure the solution we selected would work and now believe that we have the best system in place.” Discover how Chris McGarry, IT Director, EMIS, went about sourcing a scalable storage solution to underpin the company’s cloud-based service for GP and doctors surgeries in the UK.
Egton Medical Information Systems Ltd (EMIS) is the UK’s leading supplier of IT systems to General Practitioners and doctors surgeries; providing the software that holds the medical records for 39 million National Health Service patients nationwide. The founding principle behind the company is that the systems used by General Practice surgeries should improve patient care, so the idea of EMIS software ‘written by doctors, for doctors’ was born. To this day, from knowledge support to interoperability, clinical research projects and free online services for patients, EMIS still puts patient care at the heart of every click of the mouse.
Bridging the Gap between Healthcare and Technology With more than half of all GPs across the UK using EMIS software, the company has to manage a vast and ever increasing amount of information. Also, critical to patient care is the need to share information to different healthcare practitioners in a timely manner.
EMIS turned to Cloud Computing when developing its next generation healthcare IT system, EMIS Web. The system, which is already being used by forward-thinking NHS organisations across the UK, is highly intelligent and is driving a dramatic step change in the way that healthcare providers access and manage patient information.
A key benefit of the system is that it enables healthcare practitioners working in different settings to share access to a patient’s GP record, delivering streamlined and improved patient care and improving efficiency. As a hosted system, EMIS Web also takes away the pain for the customer of managing the physical IT infrastructure. EMIS Web has already delivered significant time and cost- saving benefits to a number of NHS customers and uptake is expected to increase from autumn 2010, when the product is expected to have received formal accreditation for use by NHS GPs.
The Infrastructure Challenge “Our existing storage infrastructure just would not have been fast enough or scalable enough for what we wanted to achieve with EMIS Web. Tens of thousands of users would be accessing and using the system. We needed a storage solution that would scale, and grow at a rate to support more and more records, eventually up to 15 times that of the original system, without slowing down user access.” Chris McGarry, IT Director, EMIS. With the existing growth and success EMIS had seen, coupled with the preparation for the launch of their cloud service, EMIS Web, the company began to investigate alternative data storage options. Improved performance, long-term scalability and competitive pricing were key.
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