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Comprising of six hospitals across the capital, University College London Hospitals (UCLH) is one of the largest Trusts in the NHS, providing academically-led, acute and specialist healthcare services. In the last year alone, the Trust has handled over 160,000 in-patient and more than 950,000 out-patient appointments.

IT plays an essential role in enabling the delivery of top-quality patient care, world-class research and education. The ICT team has an obligation to the patients and users to deliver robust, secure and standardised services that will allow the Trust's frontline practitioners to carry out their work efficiently and to the highest standard.

While working hard to constantly improve the levels of system availability, performance and service quality across the Trust's technical estate, the ICT team is continually looking to identify ways to free up resources and reduce costs.

Several aspects of the management of UCLH's technical estate, such as its service desk and the management of end-user technology services, are outsourced. To improve efficiency and better plan for longer-term strategic investments, the ICT team required greater intelligence on the performance and utilisation of its IT assets across the entire estate. Specifically, Ronnie Skillen, ICT service transition manager at UCLH, required a solution that would allow his team to increase value, drive down costs and improve productivity.

Commenting Skillen says, "Having access to accurate information supports good decision-making. This allows us to improve our technical estate, the management of our suppliers and the delivery of services to both users and patients."

Nexthink's analytics provide real-time intelligence on performance from the end-user's perspective, allowing the ICT team to monitor, manage and proactively respond to performance and security issues across the estate and, critically, tackle them before they become a problem.

In its first year, Nexthink has helped the ICT department to become more proactive in its approach to incident management, security and rationalisation of the technical estate. It has also become a more intelligent buyer of products and services.

Mark Taglietti, head of ICT service delivery and vendor management at UCLH, comments, "Since its implementation in January 2014, Nexthink has rapidly enabled us to become a more proactive provider of technical services, proving beneficial across a number of areas including incident management, sustainability, security and cost reduction."

An example of where UCLH is seeing a real return on investment is in its PC estate. Previously the Trust had paid for a service where PCs were refreshed every four years. With IT analytics in place, performance is now monitored on a day-to-day basis, eliminating PCs that weren't performing properly and allowing the Trust to upgrade assets when needed and make more targeted investments.

Insight into individual users of Windows XP, for example, has allowed Skillen's team to plan an aggressive Windows 7 migration. Identifying those PCs that hadn't yet been refreshed allowed the team to make a case by case decision on whether a new machine was required, whether it simply required a low cost hardware or operating system upgrade to Windows 7, or whether it could be replaced with a PC from refurbished stock.

The Trust's IT security has also benefited. Being able to quickly and proactively identify batches of PCs infected by known malware and undiscovered by existing security tools, allows the ICT team to prioritise its mitigation tactics: in many cases identifying and isolating vulnerabilities before the end-user is affected.

According to Skillen, "Nexthink improves availability levels, eases the way we in which we support the environment, whilst improving the delivery of information to users. This translates to a better user experience and an improved patient experience throughout the health service." NC