Nottinghamshire Health Informatics Service (NHIS) plays a critical role in healthcare delivery. Funded by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in Nottinghamshire, NHIS supports shared communication services used by more than 13,000 healthcare users and hundreds of IT systems which support hospitals, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and General Practitioners (GPs) across the county.
As with most publicly funded organizations, budgets are tight. This means that a shared ICT service provides an innovative and cost-effective service across its partner and customer organizations.
In a busy NHS, the challenge is to use technology to assist with the sharing and communication of important information while considering the wide range of professionals involved.
How to replicate the face-to-face communication of doctors to management to clerical staff and to patients has been a significant challenge for NHIS.
“Over the past couple of years, video conferencing has been a topic of debate a few times and in a number of guises,” recalls Mike Press, Assistant Director of NHIS. “We run a large acute care hospital and we have a satellite hospital some 20 miles away. We wanted to use a video conferencing solution between the two sites to reduce consultant and patient travel between sites.”