Free Up Your Clinicians To Focus on What Really Matters: The Patient Experience

Now more than ever, effective and efficient healthcare IT is critical for clinicians and patients alike, as tech is increasingly relied upon to deliver life-changing outcomes. Yet, organisations worldwide face a myriad of challenges, including:

• Maintaining seamless IT infrastructure performance.
• Ensuring optimal utilisation of critical applications and medical devices.
• Facilitating a productive environment for healthcare professionals.

AIOps is reshaping cost efficiency within healthcare organisations, revolutionising the way healthcare is delivered, and setting new standards for operational excellence. All the while, it supports a spend-to-save initiative in the healthcare sector, allowing organisations to fully utilise their investments and achieve more with less.

Here’s how these tools can help healthcare organisations overcome the aforementioned obstacles by providing real-time insights into the performance of critical systems, applications, and devices–enabling leaders to make informed decisions that drive cost efficiency, elevate productivity, and enhance experiences.

Maximise hardware and asset refresh budgets

Spending funds efficiently and with care can maximise impact on Trusts. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT), one of England’s largest NHS community health providers, serving a population of about 1.4 million. It oversees more than 5,000 staff and hundreds of applications and hardware assets. KCHFT prides itself on being responsive to its patients’ needs and sought to gain end-to-end visibility into its application and hardware performance. To this end, achieve this, KCHFT’s IT team deployed unified observability, offering up-to-the-minute insight into device usage and overall health.

This approach allows the Trust to replace, refurbish, recycle or remove hardware based on its remaining life rather than physical age. Darren Spinks, Head of IT Operations at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, shared: “Riverbed showed us we wouldn’t need to replace 42% of our 1,784 devices aged five years or older. This has meant that we’ve already returned our investment.” Additionally, these platforms pinpoint the exact usage of licenses, allowing Trusts to establish which are truly required; two NHS Trusts have demonstrated they could save between £130k and £230k on their software licence costs.

Reduce service desk tickets and free up time to improve patient care

Within the NHS, there’s a growing need to “shift left” in the service desk using intelligent automation and self-healing. Unified observability meets this need by combining full-fidelity cross-domain data, machine learning, correlation and more for faster problem-solving. As a result, Trusts can accelerate incident response, minimise security risks, populate trouble tickets with supporting data, guide remediation of desktop issues, and automate recovery actions.

It initially took time for KCHFT to determine the root cause of performance problems, so it saw the benefit of this first-hand. Spinks told us: “Riverbed’s solution alerted us hours before our service desk received a call regarding the incident. Now, we don’t need to wait for a user to tell us there’s a problem. It informs us of the issue, its impact, and the implications regarding time and cost.”

Another UK customer, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT), serves a local population of around 350,000 people and provides a full range of general acute, outpatient, and diagnostic services. It’s gone from receiving 629 service desk tickets outside its SLA to consistent single figures using auto-remediation, which it employs around 10,000 times a month. This ensures that all staff members feels supported and more productive, freeing up their time for them to focus on what really matters: patient care.

Improve experiences for clinicians and patients

In today’s hybrid world, every interaction matters, and healthcare organisations must measure and manage digital experiences (DEX) for both staff and the people they serve–then strive to make them more compelling. Riverbed identifies and optimises DEX hot spots, creates efficient pathways to streamline workflows for clinicians, practitioners, nurses, and consultants, and empowers all employees to deliver the quality of service and responsiveness patients expect and deserve.

PAHT’s ICT team found that 947 hours were lost each quarter due to unresponsive blue screens, negatively impacting patient care. Riverbed’s unified observability platform has reduced this to 211 hours. Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of ICT at the Trust, explained: “After deploying Riverbed’s unified observability solutions, we reduced the number of application crashes (by hang) by nearly 50%. We’ve saved almost 700 hours, around 28 days per month, which we’re effectively giving back to clinicians.”

Furthermore, many applications used by staff were legacy-based, unstable, and challenging to maintain due to the age of hospital devices–65% of which were seven years old or older, and 85% of which were PC desktops rather than more mobile laptops. Riverbed’s Aternity solution provided full visibility across the end-user experience, uncovering the impact of outdated devices on their infrastructure. It also empowered them to proactively fix issues before clinicians even notice, boosting work rate by 25%, staff satisfaction, and patient outcomes.

Stay sustainable

Unified observability solutions can help organisations reduce their carbon footprint while cutting costs and meet long-term sustainability goals like achieving net zero. In March 2023, PAHT required the carbon equivalent of 4,000 trees to offset idle user devices. With our data and automation tools, they’ve reduced this to around 733 trees, realising £200k in-year savings on electricity bills in the process. Altogether, these could deliver more than £1.2 million in savings to the board.

Overall, the ICT team at PAHT will see a £3 million saving over a three-to-five-year period thanks to Riverbed’s unified observability, while improving outcomes–now spending just under 40% of their time fighting fires, down from 85-90%. On average, our NHS customers experience a 58% acceleration in application login times, a 40% average reduction in IT spend on hardware refresh, and a 70% reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Trust us to help you achieve similarly incredible results–driving in-year savings, elevating productivity, and enhancing experiences for everyone. Reach out today to learn how. Together, we can unleash the full potential of your infrastructure and unlock the power of your investments, from server room to operating room to boardroom.