The digitisation of the NHS is by no means a new concept. Technology has long been seen as a critical driver in overcoming mounting waiting lists, evolving care requirements, increasing patient expectations and a workforce often stretched beyond its limits. 

However, as trusts up and down the country contend with the increasingly complex needs of a growing and ageing population- on top of the lasting impact of a global pandemic- progress has been decidedly slow.

Despite considerable digital adoption within individual NHS organisations, little has changed in the way trusts communicate, connect patient data and deliver care across channels and departments.

As a result, the full potential of digitalisation to improve efficiency, productivity, and staff and patient experiences has yet to be realised. At the same time, siloed, legacy and patchwork systems place a considerable operational and financial burden on the health service. 

NHS staff are well aware of the challenges they face – and confident in the ability of digital and cloud technology to overcome them.

Three quarters believe that the adoption of health tech has already improved healthcare standards across the UK thanks to increased collaboration with colleagues (70%), and improved training (56%), knowledge sharing (52%) and record keeping (48%).

To overcome its mounting challenges, healthcare must move beyond the stage of digital adoption into the transformation of its entire operation. Migration from on-premise environments to cloud solutions is pivotal to this digital evolution. However, cloud adoption is not a one-size-fits-all solution that can be applied uniformly across the entire NHS.

Health Cloud can help. BT, in partnership with Dell, delivers a hybrid model, hosting workloads and data in the public cloud, a private cloud or a colocation arrangement. We co-design with NHS trusts to migrate and host workloads wherever they are needed most, depending on the needs of the organisation, staff and patients.

The potential impact of moving to a health cloud model is difficult to overstate. Cloud migration is predicted to save UK healthcare providers over £14 billion across the next five years. NHS trusts can also save up to 83% on egress charges when transforming operations with BT and Dell.

BT has been partnered with Dell for decades, supporting businesses and the public sector. Together, BT and Dell work in over 180 countries, delivering connection, security and innovation. 

With the support of Dell and our extensive partner network, BT delivered the Health Cloud solution to a large acute trust, enabling it to modernise infrastructure, remove legacy hardware from hospital environments and become the primary tenant for a connected, collaborative regional cloud platform.

BT has supported critical NHS services for over six decades, successfully delivering emergency call centres, blue light communications, the Spine/N3 secure broadband network and much more.

At the same time, Dell hardware has provided the IT backbone for NHS organisations for over 30 years. 

BT and Dell are much more than telecoms and IT providers to the health service. We are long-term trusted partners aligned in our values and our vision to deliver reliable, secure and cost-efficient services– to trusts, staff and patients.