Scarborough NHS Trust
Remotely Hosted Eclipse-fm®
When we started using Eclipse-fm® back in December 2002 we experienced many problems, not least with our IT infrastructure. We had a bandwidth of 2Mb, half of which was tied to the telecommunications network. Consequently, with three sites 25 miles away, the speed of the system was very slow and data integrity problems were introduced. With 85,000 records in our Ticket file, I ran a simple report at Scarborough where the file server is located. It took 8.5 minutes to complete the report and 55 minutes from one of our remote sites.
With the help of Asckey Data Services Ltd I accessed a copy of the same database on a file server in their offices in Cambridgeshire, running the same report from the same sites as before. The time taken was 1 minute 50 seconds.
Our data has since been cleaned up and installed at Asckey’s offices where we have observed a five-fold increase in speed. Although this may well be partly due to our new IT network infrastructure it is still an impressive achievement.
The transfer of the data was not without a few minor problems but given the state of our data this was to be expected. However, working with Asckey helped the transition to a remotely hosted system run smoothly. In the past four months, the orphaned records have reduced to just two, both of which the team at Asckey resolved within one hour of being reported.
Any updates or modifications are now carried out with little or no noticeable downtime.
The down side is obviously the cost of the services that Asckey provide and in our present financial climate this is an issue. As the system works as it should and the data is accurate and secure, it is a price the Trust is prepared to pay. Provided more management reports are available and they can have confidence in the information given, the additional costs can be easily justified.
Alan Jeffels
Scarborough & North-East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust
