Teneo helps improve flow of patient data at NHS Bournemouth and Poole

Teneo, a leading infrastructure optimisation specialist, has helped NHS Bournemouth and Poole speed up access to a range of IT and clinical applications at The Adam Practice, a network of four doctor’s surgeries.

The Adam Practice is a network of four doctor’s surgeries in and around Poole, Dorset and is part of NHS Bournemouth and Poole. Fourteen GPs work across the surgeries, along with fourteen nurses and nurse practitioners plus teams of district nurses, health visitors and practice staff. The Adam Practice uses EMIS LV, a clinical software application widely used by GP practices which controls medical records, reports, prescriptions and appointments, as well as Sage accounting, practice intranet, internet and email.

The main surgery at Hamworthy has a 10Mbps connection with its three branch surgeries using one Mbps connections, supporting 80 users in total. Network traffic typically consists of scanned documents in TIF format and Microsoft Word documents. Users were finding it was taking an excessive amount of time to load attachments, with doctors reporting that large documents such as patient discharge forms sent from hospitals to the GPs were taking far too long to be sent and opened up.

Chris Johnson, IT manager at The Adam Practice is responsible for IT across the four surgeries. To address the poor network performance, Johnson initially considered increasing bandwidth but this proved uneconomical. He then approached Teneo which advised trialling Riverbed Steelhead appliances. Teneo engineers installed one Steelhead appliance at each surgery.

Once the Riverbed appliances were installed, download times decreased dramatically with a six megabyte Sage file which previously took a over a minute to open, now taking just eight seconds with Riverbed. The Riverbed devices work by removing duplicate data sent across the network – during the trial period average data levels reduced by 72 per cent. The Adam Practice subsequently purchased the four Riverbed units.

Chris Johnson, IT manager, The Adam Practice, commented:
“The support and service we received from Teneo was fantastic – they configured the Steelheads quickly and efficiently and everything ran smoothly and according to plan. Like most NHS PCT practices we are under continuing pressure to adopt the latest technologies to improve service while also minimising expenditure. Teneo has enabled us to rise to this technology challenge, to utilise our IT effectively and deliver high quality, timely care.”

James Hall, marketing director, Teneo, commented:
“Riverbed Steelheads proved perfect for NHS Bournemouth and Poole. We were interested to see a report from the independent healthcare charity The King’s Fund which highlighted that many NHS trusts were suffering from poor software application performance which is hindering staff productivity. As we have proved, solutions such as Riverbed Steelhead can make an instant contribution to employee efficiency.”