The new operational reality for NHS IT – managing complexity without increasing risk

Across the public sector, services and authorities are being expected to ‘do more with less’, and nowhere is that more evident than within the NHS. Although demand on public sector services isn’t a new phenomenon, today’s challenges are fundamentally different. Stretched budgets, staff shortages and waiting time pressures have all presented issues for many years, but as technology becomes increasingly embedded in frontline care, new risks emerge. 

Managing risk is the new priority

Technology underpins patient care. Gone are the days of handwritten notes and manual processes, replaced with efficient systems and digital tools. Information moves faster than ever, but with this evolution comes increasing risk. Cyber threats have become more sophisticated, services are increasingly interconnected and organisational change is reaching new levels of complexity. As the technology landscape rapidly evolves, the focus must be on strengthening the layers that support operations and make them resilient.

The impact of a cyber attack, system outage or infrastructure failure extends far beyond the IT department to building systems, patients and care staff. If patient records and diagnostic images cannot be accessed, or machines fail, the consequences are felt immediately on the frontline.

Increasingly, we’re seeing a growing frequency of ransomware attacks, with high profile incidents across both public and private sectors demonstrating how quickly organisations can be brought to a standstill. For healthcare providers, where every minute matters, a breach could have potentially fatal consequences. There is a very real need for the NHS to sharpen its focus on cyber resilience to ensure every environment is protected and every team prepared, should a breach occur.

A more connected NHS brings new challenges

With significant organisational transformation, there is great potential for improving collaboration, sharing resources and joined up care, as we see Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) take greater roles to support the provision of services within NHS Trusts. While these changes offer a range of opportunities for improvements, they also introduce new challenges.

With inherited environments, multivendor infrastructure platforms and a multitude of applications and workloads, accumulated over many years, there is a significant task to bring all this together. Technical expertise is stretched, with teams expected to support diverse and sometimes unfamiliar environments with limited resources.

The challenge isn’t replacing everything, it’s understanding what’s already there, what the objectives are, and how to deliver more efficiently. Rather than starting from square one, adopting a software system like HPE CloudOps Software Suite improves visibility and modernises processes. A unified platform combining HPE Morpheus, HPE OpsRamp, and HPE Zerto, the software suite makes sense of a technology environment, automating service delivery, protecting data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments and providing truly useful, actionable insights from the noise that comes from a multitude of systems.

The HPE CloudOps Software Suite simplifies hybrid cloud environments, increasing visibility, ensuring staff use systems they are familiar with and simplifying operations with a clear and straightforward multivendor approach. At HPE, we provide expert guidance to the ICBs and Trusts we work with, walking with them through the changes and ensuring that at each step, their infrastructure works for them effectively. We know that NHS leaders don’t stay awake at night worrying about servers; their concern is reducing operational risk, and we help ICBs and Trusts to manage risk and optimise patient care through effective technology.

Supporting the NHS through change

As healthcare evolves, so too must the technology that supports it. There is a balance to be struck between innovation and stability, embracing complexity and reducing operational risk, all while supporting overstretched teams, giving them tools that simplify their daily work, rather than overcomplicate it.

This requires more than just adopting a modern infrastructure, demanding greater visibility across increasingly complex environments, predicting, preventing, identifying and resolving issues before they affect frontline services. Commonly, we think about success for the NHS looking like reduced waiting times, however as we introduce technology to help make NHS services more efficient, waiting times will organically reduce, with a better visibility of the technology environment, greater automation and increased operational insight creating numerous efficiencies.

We’re excited about the future of technology within the NHS, so look out for our next blog where we’ll dive a little deeper into the technology that can help modernise NHS systems and processes.

In the meantime, we have experts on hand to help guide and advise. If you’d like to begin a conversation about taking the next step towards modernising technology, get in touch.