IT Strategy for an NHS Trust
The Royal Surrey County Hospital (RSCH) needed to develop an IT strategy within a short timescale. The existing outsourced IT service was on the point of being closed down and RSCH faced a ‘burning platform’ with its core Patient Administration System (PAS) about to come off vendor support. The Trust had grown and changed significantly in recent years and had reached a scale where a number of clinical processes needed better IT support to run smoothly whilst the leadership team needed better management information.
The IT strategy was a key component of the Trust’s integrated business plan (IBP) which had to be submitted as part of its application for Foundation Trust status.
A team of three management consultants was established to work with RSCH management and staff to deliver the IT strategy within eight weeks. The team had a broad range of expertise including: hospital clinical and management processes; NHS applications and IT infrastructure; IT strategy development; and IT service delivery, governance and programme management.
The team identified the RSCH’s key business drivers and objectives and used this as the basis for developing a business operating model, covering the organisation structure, processes, data and key user characteristics. In parallel, the team assessed the current (‘as-is’) organisation, IT infrastructure, applications and service delivery model, to highlight the key issues and identify opportunities for improvement. The operating model and IT assessment were compiled and compared to “best practice” from other Trusts and other sectors leading to an Enterprise Architecture model for the RSCH and a clear blueprint for implementing the strategy.
According to our client: “CMG recommended a programme of IT projects that will improve the day to day operations of the Trust and support the delivery of our business strategy, bringing benefits that will positively impact the patient experience for years to come. I was impressed with the professionalism of the CMG team, their ‘can do’ attitude and their willingness to accommodate our way of working in order to complete the job to time and budget.”
Achievements
- A high quality and comprehensive IT strategy document was delivered on time and budget. The strategy was presented to the RSCH Trust board and strongly endorsed by the Chairman, CEO and Deputy CEO. The strategy set out specific solutions for:
- Core application areas, including patient administration, radiology and pathology, and provided a short-list of options for all other key application areas based on the NHS’s Additional Supply of Capability and Capacity (ASCC) framework
- The IT organisation, service delivery approach and IT governance arrangements
- The IT infrastructure – recommending changes to ensure disaster recovery, improve performance and create efficient IT support
- Providing a practical roadmap for implementing the strategy, including a three-phase development approach, the timescales, key dependencies, high-level resource estimates and the key delivery risks. Following approval by the board the RSCH management team immediately kicked-off the first phase of strategy implementation