Nuffield Hospitals group has replaced its entire desktop infrastructure with a new set of 3,500 new desktop PCs provided by Dell.

The private hospital group, which has 40 hospitals in England and Scotland, made the investment after deciding its existing infrastructure had reached end-of-life and required replacement.

Nuffield’s general manager for IT service management, Iain Roy told E-Health Insider: “Nuffield is embarking on quite a radical overhaul of its IT infrastructure. We wanted a new infrastructure to support new applications we are using to deliver healthcare. Our HP/Compaq system was over five years old and was unreliable. For example, it couldn’t support integrated PACS.”

The group wanted a new strategic, reliable technology partner to provide new desktops that would support their implementation of current and future procurement and after a lengthy tender process, chose Dell for its ‘proven performance, stability, flexibility, and overall full-service offering’, which met its selected specification.

Roy said: “Dell was keen to work with us to identify how to best roll out its desktops to suit our business. The most efficient way for Dell to work with us was to deliver the desktops to a central location, where engineers then implemented them site-by-site.

“This new package offers us reliability for our 3,500 machines and lets us use one standard desktop image across the network. This allows us to easily put applications across the network and fundamentally drives down the costs of support we used to experience.”

Dell’s vice president of the UK public sector division, Iain Campbell said: “Dell’s industry expertise and knowledge of the hospital’s requirements and challenges have resulted in a customised, reliable and secure solution that offers better services to the hospital’s patients. The hospital saw Dell as a one-stop shop, where all of its hardware, software and implementation needs could be met.”

Nuffield are also using Dell’s Premier Pages to help streamline all its IT procurement needs, with a full product list available at the click of a button.

Head of the health division at Dell, Richard Rawcliffe, told E-Health Insider: “This deal allows us to bring our health experience to them. We are able to allow them to move forward with new applications such as PACS by meeting their required specification and providing support to them. We hope to learn a lot by working and learning with Nuffield.”

Nuffield say that their IT infrastructure overhaul is ongoing and they will soon be looking at other new services they require.

“We are consolidating and reviewing our supplier base constantly and are looking to maximise a return on our investments, especially the money spent on technology,” Roy said.

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