nhs blood & transplant cdo aaron powell interview
TRANSCRIPT
Putting digital at the heart
In association with
Written by Lucy Dixon Produced by Andrew Lloyd
Putting digital at the heart
NHS Blood and Transplant
(NHSBT) facilitates
organ donation
and transplantation across the
whole of the UK and also manages
the supply of blood and tissues, as
well as a range of specialist blood
testing, for England. And, as Chief
Digital Officer Aaron Powell explains,
technology is making an incredible
impact on the work it does, ultimately
improving patient outcomes and
saving lives. “What we’re doing
has a direct impact in saving
and improving people’s lives. It’s
what we’re about as an organisation.
Whether it’s providing services to
blood donors that enable them to
make appointments to come and
give blood or providing services that
allow us to accurately and efficiently
allocate the precious gifts that people
donate to us to the right patient, my
job is to make sure the technology
services that we offer are resilient and
robust to enable the team to do the
best possible job that they can do.”
Powell’s appointment as CDO for
NHSBT in 2015 coincided with the
organisation’s shift towards a more
digital operation. “My appointment
heralded the beginning of a real
focus on digital and what digital can
mean for what we do as a blood and
transplant organisation,” he explains.
“We had already started to explore
digital opportunities but, in line with
many public sector organisations,
we’d focused initially on our customer-
facing activity.” So the website and
portals for potential blood donors
were already developed, making
the next step thinking about what
NHSBT might do differently as an
For NHS Blood and Transplant, digital is at the heart of everything it does, from its customer-facing website and blood donor portal, to the ways that transplant surgeons receive information and make decisions
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NHS Blood and Transplant delivers an essential service, saving lives on a dailybasis.
At any given time, NHSBT employees need visibility of exactly where blood products are, exactly where they’ve been and exactly who they’ve gone to, so it is critical that
allows them to access this information in a timely manner.
With a view to become asset-free in the next 3-5 years, NHSBT recently underwent a large scale transformational project to move away from their legacy infrastructure and begin transitioning services into the cloud.
To support this, SCC, Europe’s largest independent IT solutions provider, teamed up with HP Inc. to design and execute a solution to refresh their desktop estate and provide futureproof technology to support desktop modernisation.
The introduction of HP Elite 1012 devices
between tablet and laptop mode, allowing them to securely access information and applications from the cloud, even when on the move.
Using HP’s T630 thin client devices, NHSBT employees can now connect to SCC’s secure cloud network to remotely access their desktop applications from any device. This increased business mobility
infrastructure.
The whole project is funded using SCC’s
total cost of ownership. Flex Start
consolidating all invoices for purchased equipment into one predictable quarterly statement, reducing administration and making it easier to audit.
Following a successful hardware rollout, SCC provides ongoing managed services, with teams of HP accredited device experts on hand to provide maintenance to all NHSBT sites across the UK and 24x7 support from SCC’s award winning customer service centre.
The 30 year partnership between SCC and HP Inc. combines SCC’s end to end technology solutions and secure cloud services, with industry-leading HP devices to provide NHSBT with the technology they need to support the delivery of services which save lives.
SCC and HP Inc.: Driving digital transformation with NHS Blood and Transplant
People do business. We make it work. Plan | Supply | Integrate | Manage
HP Elite x2 1012 G1
NHS Blood and Transplant has partnered with SCC, Europe’s largest independent IT services business, and HP Inc., to deliver innovation in a way that will change healthcare.
Driving Digital Transformation
www.scc.com
organisation if it was able to take
full advantage of the capabilities
that digital technologies provide.
NHSBT enables over 4,000
transplants to occur across the UK
every year and has over one million
blood donors registered to book
appointments via the organisation’s
online portal. It processes around
6,000 units of blood every day,
supplying 200 hospital trusts
in England with essential blood
for surgery, trauma and blood
transfusions. “We maintain a regular
supply of blood across the country
and then we have a diagnostic
and therapeutic services division,
which is an essential collection of
business units, providing specialised
testing capabilities and therapeutic
apheresis services,” Powell adds.
The digital transformation that
is now framing everything NHSBT
does is all about connectedness and
personalisation – focusing on how
it can connect information across
the different business units in order
to provide a better service. “We’ve
been working on understanding
what a connected health service
and a personalised health service
actually means. How we can provide a
more joined-up service to people with
other parts of the NHS? And how can
we ultimately connect that information
to someone outside of the health
sector, to make sure that the service
we’re providing is one that is designed
around the needs of individual
donors and suits their lifestyle and
the way they wish to donate?”
Although Powell describes this as
a ‘journey that we’re on rather than
a destination we’ve reached’, the
work it has carried out on the online
blood donor portal has led to over 50
percent of all bookings being made
online and a three percent increase in
attendance in just two years. “We’re
looking at the data, the processes and
technology we use to understand how
we can connect across NHSBT and
beyond in order to rethink the services
we offer,” he adds. The donor portal’s
primary purpose is to give donors a
better experience in terms of allowing
them to make and view appointments
at a time convenient to them, and it
has additional benefits for NHSBT. “In
terms of our own processing, it has
significantly reduced the overhead
of management appointment bookings
and we have saved around £1.4
million just in terms of the paperwork
associated with donor appointments
as a consequence,” Powell says.
NHSBT’s technology strategy
needed a complete rethink in order to
deliver this digital-first approach, says
Powell. “Like a lot of organisations we
have got very good legacy systems
that we have been running for a
number of years that were essentially
We’re looking at the data, the processes and technology we use to understand how we can connect across NHSBT and beyond in order to rethink the services we offer
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See our work with NHS Blood and Transplant here
Ready means getting blood to patients in time
VodafonePower to you
“
”NHS Blood and Transplant
It’s no exaggeration to say that our ability to provide hospitals across England and
North Wales with the blood they need depends on Vodafone services.
Our extensive global network, covering more than150 countries can help your organisation be ready for anything.We provide the infrastructure backbone across fixed, mobile and cloud that enables digital transformation both in the private and public sector. It’s this network that enables NHSBT to be more agile, responsiveand operate securely.
We partner with award-winning suppliers such as Cisco to provide UK organisations with a fully unified all-in-one communications solutionthat keeps people connected and supports the delivery of critical services.
developed in either the late 90s
or early 2000s. Sharing data and
processes on these systems has been
hard so we framed a strategy around
this – we knew that we needed to
do technology differently but we
hadn’t really thought through how
differently so, as a consequence of
that, a number of our systems were
at risk of becoming unstable and we
needed to shore them up.
So the watch words
around the strategy
were that we would
stabilise, protect
and migrate the
existing systems.”
A significant part of
that stabilisation was
achieved by securing
hosting arrangements
SCC data centres that put NHSBT’s
systems on a sound footing. Powell
adds: “And then we’re looking to
protect those systems by bringing in
the latest versions of the technologies
that we currently operate as we
migrate them to the new world,
as we call it, which is about using
cloud services to provide resilience,
scalable and flexible solutions
that we can integrate using open
standards and open interfaces into
other applications that are delivered
to us primarily as SaaS.” This means
that NHSBT doesn’t need to think
about the infrastructure and the
technology, but can focus on the
business functionality and usability.
“We think about how we can leverage
the technology to save
and improve lives,
which is ultimately
what we’re about as
an organisation.”
So NHSBT has
been working
with SCC closely
on this issue of
operational stability of its
applications, for the future for
all of the services it operates. “We also
worked with Microsoft quite heavily
to explore the possibilities of cloud
services and how we can have those
flexible services that allow us to scale
up in times of peak activity but also
scale down in times of reduced activity
and have confidence that those
services are available and they’re
Number of employees at NHS Blood and
Transplant
5,000
w w w. n h s b t . n h s . u k 1 1
supported in safe environments,
with other people worrying about
the underlying technology.”
Another crucial partner has
been Vodafone, Powell says,
which provides all of NHSBT’s
connectivity and telephony contracts.
“Our collaboration with Vodafone
gives us the network capability
to access these services and to
access them in a reliable way, and
the bandwidth across our network to
allow us to access and make heavy
use of cloud-based services.”
On the organ donation and
transplantation side, NHSBT
has started to use the intelligent
computing capabilities of the IBM
Business Process Management
Solution in order to develop a set
of allocation rules. “With this we
can change more flexibly over
Next Generation Digital Transformation
www.t-impact.com | 01235 854044
T-Impact is NHSBT’s strategic delivery partner for Business Process Automati on and Business Rules Management using IBM BPM and ODM.
We’re helping to deliver NHSBT’s 2020 transformati on strategy by improving the process and effi ciency of organ donati on and transplantati on across the UK. It’s a partnership delivering world-class technology to a vital service, and we’re proud to be a part of it.
See how T-Impact can accelerate your digital transformati on journey and deliver up to a 40% uplift in performance and cost effi ciency whilst improving customer experience and regulatory compliance.
The IBM logo and the IBM Member Business Partner mark are trademarks of Internati onal Business Machines Corporati on, registered in many jurisdicti ons worldwide.
time to respond to clinical needs
and clinical practices around organ
allocation, to ensure that the maximum
number of people have access to
organ transplantation as a therapy
and we make best use of the organs
that are available to us from donors.”
Organ allocation schemes are
designed to balance equity and
utility – fundamentally to make
sure that everyone in need has a
fair chance of an organ transplant.
When you consider that organs
are in short supply, and on average
three people still die every day in
need of a transplant, it is easy to
see that every efficiency allowed by
technology can make a difference
on the number of lives extended
through organ transplantation. “It’s
about making sure that we match
the donor organ with the transplant
recipient in a way that is safe and
will result in a positive outcome
to the transplant, but also make
sure that the allocation scheme
maximises the number of people
who will receive a transplant and the
number of years that they will live
with a donated organ,” Powell adds.
The allocation scheme works
behind the scenes in conjunction
with DonorPath, which is an iPad
app created for the specialist nurses.
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Powell says: “The nurses can
collate all the information they need
about an organ donor in order to
provide information to the transplant
surgeons to make a decision about
whether or not to accept an organ.
That’s a risk-based decision
based upon the factors of the
recipient they’re dealing with and the
donor.” This transforms 75 pages
of paper forms that the nurses fill in
into a risk profile that the transplant
centres can make a decision on.
“We have another digital service
called our Electronic Offering
Service (EOS) which is available
to transplant surgeons on a range
of mobile devices that gives them
the critical information they need
in order to make that decision in
real time.” And the nature of organ
donation and transplantation means
these decisions need to be made
quickly. Once again, this illustrates
how technology – in this case, the
processing of information, can make
a difference by reducing delays and
helping the transplant teams manage
the logistics more efficiently.
Powell highlights the multiple
benefits his team provides to the
wider organisation with its core
delivery programmes, such as
the ODT (organ donation and
transplantation) Hub programme.
“This is effectively creating a central
command and control centre for
organ donation and transplantation
that uses intelligent technology
such as the IBM business process
management system to allow us to
manage the real-time logistics.” There
is also a Core Systems Modernisation
programme, which is replacing the
traditional blood control systems
with an intelligent CRM capability
using Dynamics CRM, and a supply
chain management capability using
Dynamics AX. Another core
programme is updating the
infrastructure and desktop
operating system.
“Balancing how we interact between
SCC data centres and Microsoft cloud
services, we are relying much more
on needing connected systems, so
we also have a network improvement
programme with Vodafone that is
looking to improve the bandwidth to
all of our sites and all of our locations
over the next 12 months,” Powell says,
concluding that NHSBT is currently
investing more heavily in technology
than it has for some time, meaning
that this complex organisation is
making steady improvements. “The
technologies that we’re using allow
us to both provide convenience
to our donors and to clinicians,
and also gives significant overall
operational efficiency to NHSBT.
Ultimately, it all contributes to what
we are about as an organisation –
enabling our donors to do something
amazing, to save and improve the
lives of others” Powell says.
We have another digital service called our Electronic Offering Services which is available to transplant surgeons on a range of mobile devices that gives them the critical information they need in order to make that decision in real time
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www.nhsbt.nhs.uk