With Covid-19 pushing an already-stretched public health service nearer to breaking point, can digital transformation help ease the strain?
The British Medical Association (BMA) says Covid-19 disruption is "storing up greater problems for the future" of UK healthcare. From April to November last year alone, 2.57 million fewer elective procedures were performed and outpatient appointments fell by 18 million.
However, John Thompson, managing director at Leeds-based Advanced Power Technology (APT), suggests some digital projects that can help relieve the pressure are being accelerated. APT was in the middle of a datacentre project for an NHS Trust refreshing power and cooling systems, shoring up infrastructure efficiencies and uptime, helping the Trust do more with less while keeping ahead of emerging IT issues when the pandemic began in March 2020.
"We were expecting to have to stop work halfway through," Thompson tells ChannelPro.
Instead, the team was told to double down.
"There's more demand for companies like us. We've just won a tender to build a new hospital datacentre and they're asking for another one now. They want partners who can guide them and help develop strategy."
NHS projects often require more handholding and help identifying what's available IT-wise, optimising budget, and how to approach the solutions – great for channel value-add, Thompson says.
Service and problem-solving for the specific customer environment is key. Hospitals are often busy non-purpose-designed spaces with an array of odd nooks and crannies, so it takes expertise to work out which solutions could fit where and deliver desired outcomes. Anything that frees up resources and guarantees uptime or adds visibility, monitoring or management across a distributed network or campus can be helpful.
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Often, in-house teams haven't had time to keep up and can be a few years behind, Thompson says. It's not all about supplier frameworks: APT works direct as well as on frameworks such as the Guy's and St Thomas's zero-carbon panel.
Pascal Holt, head of marketing strategy at liquid-cooling vendor Iceotope, says its sealed-chassis liquid cooling technology is going through proof-of-concept for healthcare deployments. These are harsh environments where human interference and error isn't far away.
Physical security risks, space constraints, acoustics and noise are all concerns in healthcare settings, from bedside or consulting-room areas where testing and diagnosis or critical emergency care may be taking place, or sensitive instrumentation or imaging may be involved. Then the requirement moves to scale-up, criticality and removing latency and resiliency issues, whether from interoperable modules or self-contained point systems.
"When you've got AI coming in within healthcare that means faster, more powerful chips for processing data. Then heat becomes a massive issue – not just in terms of what you do with the heat you've captured from the IT or how much is generated, but how do you take it away to let the chips work at maximum?" ...
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