Putting digital at the heart

In association with

Written by Lucy Dixon Produced by Andrew Lloyd

Putting digital at the heart

NHS Blood and Transplant

(NHSBT) facilitates

organ donation

and transplantation across the

whole of the UK and also manages

the supply of blood and tissues, as

well as a range of specialist blood

testing, for England. And, as Chief

Digital Officer Aaron Powell explains,

technology is making an incredible

impact on the work it does, ultimately

improving patient outcomes and

saving lives. “What we’re doing

has a direct impact in saving

and improving people’s lives. It’s

what we’re about as an organisation.

Whether it’s providing services to

blood donors that enable them to

make appointments to come and

give blood or providing services that

allow us to accurately and efficiently

allocate the precious gifts that people

donate to us to the right patient, my

job is to make sure the technology

services that we offer are resilient and

robust to enable the team to do the

best possible job that they can do.”

Powell’s appointment as CDO for

NHSBT in 2015 coincided with the

organisation’s shift towards a more

digital operation. “My appointment

heralded the beginning of a real

focus on digital and what digital can

mean for what we do as a blood and

transplant organisation,” he explains.

“We had already started to explore

digital opportunities but, in line with

many public sector organisations,

we’d focused initially on our customer-

facing activity.” So the website and

portals for potential blood donors

were already developed, making

the next step thinking about what

NHSBT might do differently as an

For NHS Blood and Transplant, digital is at the heart of everything it does, from its customer-facing website and blood donor portal, to the ways that transplant surgeons receive information and make decisions

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NHS Blood and Transplant delivers an essential service, saving lives on a dailybasis.

At any given time, NHSBT employees need visibility of exactly where blood products are, exactly where they’ve been and exactly who they’ve gone to, so it is critical that

allows them to access this information in a timely manner.

With a view to become asset-free in the next 3-5 years, NHSBT recently underwent a large scale transformational project to move away from their legacy infrastructure and begin transitioning services into the cloud.

To support this, SCC, Europe’s largest independent IT solutions provider, teamed up with HP Inc. to design and execute a solution to refresh their desktop estate and provide futureproof technology to support desktop modernisation.

The introduction of HP Elite 1012 devices

between tablet and laptop mode, allowing them to securely access information and applications from the cloud, even when on the move.

Using HP’s T630 thin client devices, NHSBT employees can now connect to SCC’s secure cloud network to remotely access their desktop applications from any device. This increased business mobility

infrastructure.

The whole project is funded using SCC’s

total cost of ownership. Flex Start

consolidating all invoices for purchased equipment into one predictable quarterly statement, reducing administration and making it easier to audit.

Following a successful hardware rollout, SCC provides ongoing managed services, with teams of HP accredited device experts on hand to provide maintenance to all NHSBT sites across the UK and 24x7 support from SCC’s award winning customer service centre.

The 30 year partnership between SCC and HP Inc. combines SCC’s end to end technology solutions and secure cloud services, with industry-leading HP devices to provide NHSBT with the technology they need to support the delivery of services which save lives.

SCC and HP Inc.: Driving digital transformation with NHS Blood and Transplant

People do business. We make it work. Plan | Supply | Integrate | Manage

HP Elite x2 1012 G1

NHS Blood and Transplant has partnered with SCC, Europe’s largest independent IT services business, and HP Inc., to deliver innovation in a way that will change healthcare.

Driving Digital Transformation

www.scc.com

organisation if it was able to take

full advantage of the capabilities

that digital technologies provide.

NHSBT enables over 4,000

transplants to occur across the UK

every year and has over one million

blood donors registered to book

appointments via the organisation’s

online portal. It processes around

6,000 units of blood every day,

supplying 200 hospital trusts

in England with essential blood

for surgery, trauma and blood

transfusions. “We maintain a regular

supply of blood across the country

and then we have a diagnostic

and therapeutic services division,

which is an essential collection of

business units, providing specialised

testing capabilities and therapeutic

apheresis services,” Powell adds.

The digital transformation that

is now framing everything NHSBT

does is all about connectedness and

personalisation – focusing on how

it can connect information across

the different business units in order

to provide a better service. “We’ve

been working on understanding

what a connected health service

and a personalised health service

actually means. How we can provide a

more joined-up service to people with

other parts of the NHS? And how can

we ultimately connect that information

to someone outside of the health

sector, to make sure that the service

we’re providing is one that is designed

around the needs of individual

donors and suits their lifestyle and

the way they wish to donate?”

Although Powell describes this as

a ‘journey that we’re on rather than

a destination we’ve reached’, the

work it has carried out on the online

blood donor portal has led to over 50

percent of all bookings being made

online and a three percent increase in

attendance in just two years. “We’re

looking at the data, the processes and

technology we use to understand how

we can connect across NHSBT and

beyond in order to rethink the services

we offer,” he adds. The donor portal’s

primary purpose is to give donors a

better experience in terms of allowing

them to make and view appointments

at a time convenient to them, and it

has additional benefits for NHSBT. “In

terms of our own processing, it has

significantly reduced the overhead

of management appointment bookings

and we have saved around £1.4

million just in terms of the paperwork

associated with donor appointments

as a consequence,” Powell says.

NHSBT’s technology strategy

needed a complete rethink in order to

deliver this digital-first approach, says

Powell. “Like a lot of organisations we

have got very good legacy systems

that we have been running for a

number of years that were essentially

We’re looking at the data, the processes and technology we use to understand how we can connect across NHSBT and beyond in order to rethink the services we offer

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See our work with NHS Blood and Transplant here

Ready means getting blood to patients in time

VodafonePower to you

“

”NHS Blood and Transplant

It’s no exaggeration to say that our ability to provide hospitals across England and

North Wales with the blood they need depends on Vodafone services.

Our extensive global network, covering more than150 countries can help your organisation be ready for anything.We provide the infrastructure backbone across fixed, mobile and cloud that enables digital transformation both in the private and public sector. It’s this network that enables NHSBT to be more agile, responsiveand operate securely.

We partner with award-winning suppliers such as Cisco to provide UK organisations with a fully unified all-in-one communications solutionthat keeps people connected and supports the delivery of critical services.

developed in either the late 90s

or early 2000s. Sharing data and

processes on these systems has been

hard so we framed a strategy around

this – we knew that we needed to

do technology differently but we

hadn’t really thought through how

differently so, as a consequence of

that, a number of our systems were

at risk of becoming unstable and we

needed to shore them up.

So the watch words

around the strategy

were that we would

stabilise, protect

and migrate the

existing systems.”

A significant part of

that stabilisation was

achieved by securing

hosting arrangements

SCC data centres that put NHSBT’s

systems on a sound footing. Powell

adds: “And then we’re looking to

protect those systems by bringing in

the latest versions of the technologies

that we currently operate as we

migrate them to the new world,

as we call it, which is about using

cloud services to provide resilience,

scalable and flexible solutions

that we can integrate using open

standards and open interfaces into

other applications that are delivered

to us primarily as SaaS.” This means

that NHSBT doesn’t need to think

about the infrastructure and the

technology, but can focus on the

business functionality and usability.

“We think about how we can leverage

the technology to save

and improve lives,

which is ultimately

what we’re about as

an organisation.”

So NHSBT has

been working

with SCC closely

on this issue of

operational stability of its

applications, for the future for

all of the services it operates. “We also

worked with Microsoft quite heavily

to explore the possibilities of cloud

services and how we can have those

flexible services that allow us to scale

up in times of peak activity but also

scale down in times of reduced activity

and have confidence that those

services are available and they’re

Number of employees at NHS Blood and

Transplant

5,000

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supported in safe environments,

with other people worrying about

the underlying technology.”

Another crucial partner has

been Vodafone, Powell says,

which provides all of NHSBT’s

connectivity and telephony contracts.

“Our collaboration with Vodafone

gives us the network capability

to access these services and to

access them in a reliable way, and

the bandwidth across our network to

allow us to access and make heavy

use of cloud-based services.”

On the organ donation and

transplantation side, NHSBT

has started to use the intelligent

computing capabilities of the IBM

Business Process Management

Solution in order to develop a set

of allocation rules. “With this we

can change more flexibly over

Next Generation Digital Transformation

www.t-impact.com | 01235 854044

T-Impact is NHSBT’s strategic delivery partner for Business Process Automati on and Business Rules Management using IBM BPM and ODM.

We’re helping to deliver NHSBT’s 2020 transformati on strategy by improving the process and effi ciency of organ donati on and transplantati on across the UK. It’s a partnership delivering world-class technology to a vital service, and we’re proud to be a part of it.

See how T-Impact can accelerate your digital transformati on journey and deliver up to a 40% uplift in performance and cost effi ciency whilst improving customer experience and regulatory compliance.

The IBM logo and the IBM Member Business Partner mark are trademarks of Internati onal Business Machines Corporati on, registered in many jurisdicti ons worldwide.

time to respond to clinical needs

and clinical practices around organ

allocation, to ensure that the maximum

number of people have access to

organ transplantation as a therapy

and we make best use of the organs

that are available to us from donors.”

Organ allocation schemes are

designed to balance equity and

utility – fundamentally to make

sure that everyone in need has a

fair chance of an organ transplant.

When you consider that organs

are in short supply, and on average

three people still die every day in

need of a transplant, it is easy to

see that every efficiency allowed by

technology can make a difference

on the number of lives extended

through organ transplantation. “It’s

about making sure that we match

the donor organ with the transplant

recipient in a way that is safe and

will result in a positive outcome

to the transplant, but also make

sure that the allocation scheme

maximises the number of people

who will receive a transplant and the

number of years that they will live

with a donated organ,” Powell adds.

The allocation scheme works

behind the scenes in conjunction

with DonorPath, which is an iPad

app created for the specialist nurses.

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Powell says: “The nurses can

collate all the information they need

about an organ donor in order to

provide information to the transplant

surgeons to make a decision about

whether or not to accept an organ.

That’s a risk-based decision

based upon the factors of the

recipient they’re dealing with and the

donor.” This transforms 75 pages

of paper forms that the nurses fill in

into a risk profile that the transplant

centres can make a decision on.

“We have another digital service

called our Electronic Offering

Service (EOS) which is available

to transplant surgeons on a range

of mobile devices that gives them

the critical information they need

in order to make that decision in

real time.” And the nature of organ

donation and transplantation means

these decisions need to be made

quickly. Once again, this illustrates

how technology – in this case, the

processing of information, can make

a difference by reducing delays and

helping the transplant teams manage

the logistics more efficiently.

Powell highlights the multiple

benefits his team provides to the

wider organisation with its core

delivery programmes, such as

the ODT (organ donation and

transplantation) Hub programme.

“This is effectively creating a central

command and control centre for

organ donation and transplantation

that uses intelligent technology

such as the IBM business process

management system to allow us to

manage the real-time logistics.” There

is also a Core Systems Modernisation

programme, which is replacing the

traditional blood control systems

with an intelligent CRM capability

using Dynamics CRM, and a supply

chain management capability using

Dynamics AX. Another core

programme is updating the

infrastructure and desktop

operating system.

“Balancing how we interact between

SCC data centres and Microsoft cloud

services, we are relying much more

on needing connected systems, so

we also have a network improvement

programme with Vodafone that is

looking to improve the bandwidth to

all of our sites and all of our locations

over the next 12 months,” Powell says,

concluding that NHSBT is currently

investing more heavily in technology

than it has for some time, meaning

that this complex organisation is

making steady improvements. “The

technologies that we’re using allow

us to both provide convenience

to our donors and to clinicians,

and also gives significant overall

operational efficiency to NHSBT.

Ultimately, it all contributes to what

we are about as an organisation –

enabling our donors to do something

amazing, to save and improve the

lives of others” Powell says.

We have another digital service called our Electronic Offering Services which is available to transplant surgeons on a range of mobile devices that gives them the critical information they need in order to make that decision in real time

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www.nhsbt.nhs.uk