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Citrix XenDesktop & Shared Services Case StudyDudley Primary Care Trust |
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Taking Shared Services from Vision to Reality for Midlands NHS
customer "Not only does
the solution tick all the boxes for provisioning access for the
Mental Health Trust, but it will also enable us to keep track of
the way we provide services.”
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| Features: Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer, AppSense & NetApp | |
Summary
Dudley Primary Care Trust (PCT) has appointed Centralis to develop a regional shared services technology infrastructure underpinned by a virtualised desktop environment. The solution will allow personnel throughout the Black Country access to key systems and information, radically transforming application delivery.
About the Customer
The Dudley PCT area covers 56 general GP practices and 40 dental surgeries, 40 ophthalmic premises, 60 pharmacy premises and directly employs more than 1800 people, over 900 of whom provide community based healthcare across 27 nursing teams, and over 600 provide mental health and learning disability services across the borough. Services include 24 hour district nursing, health visiting, mental health, adults’ and children’s learning disabilities, podiatry, audiology, school nurses, continence, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy. The Dudley PCT is committed to providing better health for all by improving opportunities in communities with poor health, improving access to high quality health care and improving coverage of disease prevention services.
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“ The consultancy provided by Centralis has been critical in realising our vision of a centralised desktop delivery model. " |
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Bill Remmer, Head of IT at Dudley PCT |
The Challenge
The award winning independent consultancy was engaged to design and build a proof of concept to change the way Dudley provisions desktop access for over 3,000 staff. Central to the solution is the ability for staff to securely access data and applications from within and outside the Trust’s IT environment.
Firstly, as Dudley PCT is responsible for overseeing a distributed environment with staff spread across 100 different locations, managing user requirements proved a challenge. The PCT has also taken on the role of single service provider for the local Mental Health Trust, extending its technology remit to Walsall. However, as the Trust has no sight of the IT environment Walsall is operating, creating a standardised service on both networks proved complex.
The Centralis Solution
A proof of concept design, built on Citrix XenServer, Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, AppSense and Secure Remote Access was successfully developed to demonstrate how Dudley PCT could provision desktop access for two separate IT environments, one of which it has no control or access to.
Offering a greater degree of agility and flexibility, the solution will provide an equal experience for users whether they login through the Dudley or Walsall network.
Adopting this approach will also enable Dudley to consolidate its IT server environment from 120 physical to approximately 16 using virtual servers. The project has been driven by two key factors.
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" We’ve carried out a great deal of testing and the next step for us is to invest in the infrastructure to make the shared services vision a reality, Centralis’ ongoing support will prove invaluable in achieving this. " |
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Bill Remmer, Head of IT at Dudley PCT |
The
Benefits to the Customer
The PCT has already benefitted from using the proof of concept to standardise how GPs access performance data from the PCT.
Dudley decided it was much quicker and simpler to deploy its information management tool as a web application. Using Citrix bypasses the connectivity problems and speeds up the process of dialogue considerably.
“The consultancy provided by Centralis has been critical in realising our vision of a centralised desktop delivery model. Not only does the solution tick all the boxes for provisioning access for the Mental Health Trust, but it will also enable us to keep track of the way we provide services across the PCT,” said Bill Remmer, Head of IT at Dudley PCT.
“We’ve carried out a great deal of testing and the next step for us is to invest in the infrastructure to make the shared services vision a reality, Centralis’ ongoing support will prove invaluable in achieving this” he added.
“With funding increasingly tight, the shared services model adopted by Dudley PCT highlights a best practice approach for public sector IT, both reducing costs while improving service,” said Ewen Anderson, managing director at Centralis. “With the National Programme for IT bringing large-scale change, local solutions offer the flexibility needed to embrace this approach.”
News coverage:
http://desktops.cbronline.com/news/dudley_pct_switches_to_virtualised_environment_201109
http://www.sns-uk.co.uk/news/news-full.php?newsid=13616
http://www.publictechnology.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=21935