Promoting & Protecting the Patient Experience: How HBL ICT Put People at the Center of their IT Strategy
Patient care is the core of the mission for NHS Hertfordshire team. Serving more than 1.2 million adults and children in Hertfordshire, West Essex, Bedfordshire and East England, they provide a range of community health services and hold the highest standards for their care. Achieving this high quality of care requires a dedication to patient experience – and a dedication to the experience that their clinical staff have with technology.
By placing people at the center of their IT strategy, HBL ICT eliminates technical barriers to care so that their clinicians can focus on what matters most: their patients.
Improving Clinician and Patient Experience: From Reactive to Proactive
Managing IT services for HBL ICT is no mean feat. With 10,000+ devices spread across more than 120 sites, they have a vast estate to monitor and manage. When every moment clinical staff spend dealing with technical issues is a moment they can’t spend with patients, slow devices and faulty applications have a direct impact on the delivery of care.
Prior to Nexthink, their monitoring and management data was spread out across myriad tools. The EUC team relied on employee submitted tickets to spot issues, limiting the EUC team’s ability to proactively identify and remediate issues at scale. That changed when they embraced an end user first IT strategy.
Nexthink’s endpoint deep, enterprise wise visibility provided the data and insights necessary to take that proactive approach – finding and fixing issues before they arose. Nexthink also gave them the tools they needed to communicate effectively with leadership, boosting the standing of IT within the organization and making a clear statement of IT’s ability to improve the employee – and patient – experience.
Updates that Don’t Disrupt the Clinical Environment
With 120 sites offering 24/7 care, finding the right time to deploy an update can be an impossible task. Out of date applications have higher rates of faulty performance and present security threats – yet forced installations create downtime that can interrupt the delivery of patient care. When the time came to migrate their estate from Office 2010 to Office 365, the EUC team decided to take a new approach – one that gave the end users input on when to update their devices.
Nexthink campaigns preloaded the new packages on the devices, then gave clinicians and other staff a pop-up prompt to single click install or delay the update until a certain time. Within a short time, the organization had reached 95% compliance, and only had to force install Office365 on a few devices to finish the project. By giving clinical staff a choice on when to install the update, the IT team was able to avoid disruptions to care, keep clinical staff happy, and meet their obligations for application versioning and compliance.
Clinical Applications That Work When They Need To
Clinical applications are utilized by thousands of users daily, and performance issues can quickly impact delivery of care not for just a few patients – but for patients across multiple sites. Identifying and remediating the root cause of application issues must happen fast – before it can negatively impact care.
When the service desk at HBL ICT started receiving calls about a particular 3rd party device, they dug into Nexthink’s data to look for the root cause – searching for commonalities across the reported and unreported issues.
Using the Nexthink’s Network Visualization, they were able to identify the origin of the issue – servers owned by the 3rd party app provider. Nexthink’s data helped them start the conversation with the 3rd party provider in a positive way, so that they could collaborate and resolve the issue in a timely manner – eliminating distractions for clinicians and disruptions for patients.
Building Trust & Confidence with Leadership
When the log4j vulnerability in Java emerged last year, the digital workplace team at HBL ICT leapt into action to ensure their estate was not affected. Using Nexthink, they leveraged remote actions to locate any files in their estate with the vulnerability. Out of the 9,000 devices checked only 2 had the files – the 2 test machines on which they’d intentionally placed the vulnerable code.
Armed with this complete certainty in their compliance, the team was able to report to management that the estate was not vulnerable to the log4j issue. What might have taken months to troubleshoot in the past, they were able to confidently eliminate as an issue in a matter of hours. Securing management – and patient – trust in IT compliance.
Putting Patients at the Center of Technology
HBL ICT centers the 1.2 million members of their community throughout their practice – and their technology strategy. By embracing DEX and using employee experience as their barometer for success, they are able to remove digital disruptions and distractions for clinicians – so that clinical staff that keep their focus on what matters most: their patients.
To learn more about HBL ICT's approach to digital workplace management, you can watch their recent webinar "The Evolution of End User Experience" here.
The Nexthink Infinity platform leverages the AWS Cloud solution to offer unparalleled visibility into the Digital Employe Experience for enterprise IT teams.
