- Smart Healthcare, Thursday 28 January 2010 11.50 GMT
Floating free: Kent and Medway's thin client project should help staff work remotely as well as save money. Photo of Medway river: jiunlimited.com
Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust reckons it will cut £250,000 from its annual costs, as well as saving staff time, by moving to thin client computers.
Les Manley, director of information and IT for the trust, said the £650,000 initiative will generate two type of savings. One is an annual cost saving of £250,000, the other is cost avoidance.
"We are becoming more IT enabled, putting increasing pressure on our networks, so that if we don't do something like this very soon, we would need to upgrade our networks," he told SmartHealthcare.com.
"And that is a significant cost because we are a large organisation with many sites. By using a thin client solution we will be able to put off or even delay indefinitely some of those upgrades. So we are achieving a further £290,000 one off cost saving and £145,000 in ongoing support costs."
The project was not primarily driven by cost savings, but by benefits to patients and staff, Manley said. These include an extension of mobile and remote working, better data security and environmental benefits.
The first phase of the project will see 250 mobile workers and 750 users at locations with smaller network connections going live in early 2010.
"A major issue with remote and mobile working is how you connect back to your office systems, and typically there are two approaches," Manley said. "One is that you are connected to your office systems and the other is that you are disconnected and you synchronise by going back to the office.
"There are problems with both of those generally. If you are connected, it is potentially costly and you have to have quite big connections, unless all your applications are thin to start with. And if you if you synchronise, then you probably have multiple copies of things out there.
"How thin client helps is that it means we can be connected to our systems, but deliver performance as if we had nice big fat network connection. And we avoid all the complications of synchronisation, the risks of information being out of date, and the information governance issues of confidential data having to be on those machines."
This is one of several ways in which the project will improve data security, said Manley. Others include better data quality because staff have the ability to enter data immediately rather than transferring information, and central storage eliminating the need for multiple copies.
"There are benefits in terms of carbon savings and sustainability," he added. "Once we have this solution in place a lot of out technical support is centralised.
"But also the energy usage of all of these machines running across the organisation, whereas the devices that we buy will be lower energy and have a longer life, because all the processing is done at the centre."
The project will also manage software licences on behalf of the trust. "From time to time we can reallocate a licence, but we also know that we won't over use a licence," he said.
"Business continuity is another one, because if we can provide the desktop to any machine operating a browser we can run from pretty much anywhere."
The trust paid IT consultancy Centralis to design and building a proof of concept based on Citrix's XenApp and Appsense to centralise desktop delivery to staff.
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