The James Paget NHS Trust has entered into a second agreement with NextiraOne, a Europe-based communication services provider, to build additional dedicated data center facilities and provide a new communications platform.
The James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, based in Litchfield, UK, provides care for the Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Waveney areas. With more than 500 beds and serving a population of 230,000, the trust provides community hospital care at Lowestoft Hospital and Northgate Hospital in Great Yarmouth, together with an integrated hospital and community children's service.
Trust officials said the contract is a step toward delivering better patient care while reducing power consumption and carbon footprint.
“We had very clear objectives around reducing our carbon footprint, at the same time as providing failsafe systems for critical medical applications and business continuity,” said Stephen Kirk, the trust's infrastructure operations manager. “NextiraOne built our first Nexus Suite Data Centre and so the team knew our requirements and expectations intimately.”
Trust officials expect the new solutions will help ensure the continuity of critical medical and business applications. The data center completes the creation of a new network infrastructure supporting storage area networking and server virtualization. This will help underpin the growing range of administrative functions, clinical applications and admission-critical systems for A&E and Theatre, including the PACS digital X-ray system and links to the National Patient’s Records System, said Trust officials.
“They (NextiraOne) have given us expert advice throughout and we are confident that the system we are building together will provide the trust, our staff and our patients with a highly resilient, environmentally friendly IT and communications infrastructure that is also scalable for our future needs as more and more clinical and administrative functions become digitized,” said Kirk.
The project is designed to help the trust migrate to a virtualized set of servers and adhere to goals set down to reduce the carbon footprint by leveraging new environmental technology. Trust officials said the contract was worth more than £1.5 million and includes three years of management and operational services.
