Outsourcing 'saves money' in Hampshire

A company that provides outsourcing IT support to GP practices in England’s largest primary care trust claims it is preventing business continuity costs of more than £200,000 a year.

Healthcare Computing has provided an IT managed support service to around 140 GP practices in NHS Hampshire since 2009 and has been working with the PCT since 2004.

The company says its server and switch monitoring solutions increased server uptime towards 100%.

As a result, it claims its services are preventing business continuity expenses of more than £200,000, based on the costs attributed by GP practices to interruptions caused by network failures.

The company has supplied and installed more than 5,000 workstations in GP practices since it began working with the PCT. In 2009, it also developed and implemented a remote asset management and software deployment solution.

Andy Eyles, head of ICT - primary care at NHS Hampshire, said: “It's great to see that the investment in server and switch monitoring is preventing significant failures and reducing costly disruption to GP practices.”

Neil Payne, managing director of Healthcare Computing, said: “It is unusual to be able to quantify return on investment and potential savings and these results prove our commitment to providing cost saving, efficient solutions for GPs.”

The company said the figures were calculated using calls volumes taken from service management reports. It said “ROI per call logged” was calculating using the remedy figures provided by GPs as the real cost of their downtime or inconvenience.

The company said the figures assumed that the remedy figures were accurate and that each call logged through proactive monitoring did not cause down time or inconvenience as set out in the service level agreement.