MEMBER’S FIRST CONTRACT WITH NHS

A Midlands based IT firm and member of UKITA has provided a technical solution enabling staff at a local NHS Mental Health Trust to use an application on their iPads saving both time and money.

Micro-Business Maintenance was approached by South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to provide a specific technical solution. As part of its commitment to introduce new technologies to improve working practices and reduce costs, the Trust has recently provided Executive and Non-Executive Directors with iPads. One significant cost saving from the introduction of these iPads has been the reduction in both time and printing costs, as senior staff are now able to make use of digital copies of papers, automatically synchronised with content on the users iPad, whilst in meetings.

The Trust identified an application called GoodReader® for use on iPads which enables users to read and annotate PDFs together with other document formats. In order to distribute copies of necessary documents, the Trust needed a mechanism to allow hosted content in a folder on an external server to be synchronised with specific folders on user’s iPads. Because of the stringent NHS data security requirements the server had to be both encrypted to a high level and located within England, but still enable the upload of data by administrative staff from within the secure NHS network used by the Trust whilst evidencing and providing assurance of high levels of security.

Wombourne based Micro Business Maintenance has been providing IT solutions and support to businesses for over 20 years. Jason Timmins, technical director, explained: “We provided a test environment at no initial cost to establish if the Trust’s requirements could be met and ultimately we provided a solution that worked. After successful testing, the iPads are now being configured by the Trust to enable this secure data synchronisation.”

Pete Kendal, Head of IM&T Development at the Trust explained: “Micro-Business Maintenance provided a good, inexpensive solution and were responsive to our needs. We were particularly impressed with the speed and honesty of their advice and they further helped with another requirement to identify a third party, off-the-shelf product to support the upload of data. We’d certainly approach them again for any bespoke technical support we required relating to this project.”

Contacts:
Micro Business Maintenance Limited
Jason Timmins, Technical Director
www.mbmltd.co.uk
01902 324494

South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Pete Kendal, Head of IM&T Development
01785 258969