The Isle of Wight NHS Trust has partnered with Cinos to provide and manage its new UC and telephony systems.
The collaboration between the NHS Trust and the leading systems integrator will entail introducing the new Cisco-powered sovereign UC telephony service delivered through the Cinos Cloud. The partnership will offer the Trust a secure, flexible and robust service that will enable the organisation to implement its new hybrid working practices effectively.
Jake Gully, Digital Operations Manager at the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, commented:
With the increasing need to support our staff in adopting hybrid working practises and the ability to work from anywhere, we recognised the importance of introducing a new telephony and UC solution for the wider Trust. Simplifying the management of our telephony technology will also help to free up the Digital team to spend more time on priorities such as core infrastructure and the user experience.”
Because the Isle of Wight NHS Trust’s existing UC platform was nearing the end of its life, the Trust was considering new UC solutions which could enable new working and service delivery practices. Cinos empowers the Trust to introduce a hybrid cloud strategy that offers a comprehensive cloud service while preserving a footprint of on-premises services. That the Trust is on an island meant the hybrid approach demanded further resilience to ensure always-on communications in case of any interruption to the network.
“Alongside our hybrid approach to telephony, we recognised that we needed help building resilience into our infrastructure,” Gully added. “With Cinos’ expertise in this area and sector, we look forward to working together on the project and fully embedding the new solution as part of our ongoing service.”
The Trust’s 3,900 employees will leverage the service, which will be integrated with Microsoft Teams in line with the NHS’s broader adoption strategy. With the Cisco UC platform in place, users can make and receive calls from any location via the uniform collaboration application and have the reliability of a fully featured hybrid cloud UC platform that offers extra telephony services.
“With capital investment secured by the Trust, we can now move to a comprehensive resilient voice solution built around Microsoft Teams, which is widely used nationally,” said Marcus Garman, Digital Infrastructure Programme Manager at the Isle of Wight NHS Trust.
Garman elaborated, saying that the management of the telephony solution can be simplified to allow seamless scalability to any number of sites and users. The Trust can efficiently introduce extra functionality to enhance the end user and patient experience. The service is scheduled to be introduced in Q4 23/24, after which Garman suggested there will be “significant recurrent cost reductions of circa £360k each year on telephony within our Trust”.
The Isle of Wight NHS Trust is conscious of maintaining end-user familiarity, so it plans on upgrading and retaining the existing call recording and operator console as integral to the solution. This strategy allows the Trust to maintain its licensing investments and streamlines the migration pathway because user training is unnecessary during onboarding.
Cinos will also offer the Trust Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking service to help it move away from the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and future-proof the service past the 2025 switch-off. This will grant the Trust significant cost savings on call and line rental charges.
The NHS’s Digital Transformation
As Garman alludes to in the news of the Isle of Wight NHS Trust’s UC upgrade, the NHS is undergoing a sweeping digital transformation.
For example, Atos is currently modernising the communications infrastructure of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. Atos will install new hybrid, cloud-based technologies from its Atos Unify range. Unify’s remote and distributed work solutions will support and build upon the hospital’s role as a world-leading innovator in cancer research, diagnosis and treatment.
Atos will grant the Royal Marsden an end-to-end hybrid comms solution, including cloud paging, Teams integration and UC for static and mobile workers. These features intend to enable staff to communicate and collaborate seamlessly in the age of flexible and remote working.
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