East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust has partnered with leading digital transformation provider, ANS, to complete an end-to-end migration of its application estate to Azure Public Cloud to improve innovation and collaboration to deliver better care to its community.
The trust provide integrated acute hospital and community NHS services for East Sussex. With approx. 530,000 people living in the community and over 7,000 dedicated staff, their vision is to ‘combine community and hospital services to provide safe, compassionate, and high-quality care in order to improve the health and wellbeing of the people of East Sussex.’
Laying out four strategic aims in their ‘Better Care Together for East Sussex’ five-year strategic plan, the trust aims to:
- Improve the health of the community.
- Collaborate to deliver care better.
- Empower their employees.
- Ensure innovative and sustainable care.
To achieve these aims, the trust began to lay the foundations of its strategic plan, starting with its digital strategy, by establishing a Microsoft Azure environment but soon outgrew support from a local provider. In need of a new partner that could support scalability, East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust engaged with ANS’ Cloud Check Navigator processes which provided the trust with recommendations on their Azure tenancy across three pillars: security, architecture, and efficiency alongside a roadmap and recommendations on how to progress. Additionally, the trust employed ANS’ Cloud Migration navigator that looked at the remainder of its on-premises application landscape for which they received a transition strategy, target state architecture, defined target operating model and business case.
The outcome of both navigators highlighted the need for the trust to migrate from a Cloud Solution Provider model to an Enterprise Agreement model to accelerate the deployment and uptake of the technology needed to underpin their digital transformation strategy.
ANS will also be providing DevOps and Cloud support via our Centre of Excellence (CoE). Embedded as part of the partnership structure, the CoE will act as an extension of their existing internal teams to support the current skills gap. To bring them on the cloud journey, ANS will work to cross-skill and up-skill the internal team, enabling them to grow in their current positions whilst proving the trust with the skills necessary to continually develop, whilst also ensuring the transformation is delivered to best practices.
Speaking on the project, Andy Bissenden, Associate Director of Digital at East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, said ‘We’re continually looking at ways to improve our services and partnering with ANS will enable us to do that, whilst supporting and teaching internal teams. Ultimately this will enable us to drive forward our digital strategy and provide a better service to our community.’
Joe Wolski, CTO at ANS added ‘We’re delighted to be working with the trust on this project and to be supporting its five-year strategy. As partners, we will be engaged with them to support durable changes that will improve the lives in its community’.