01628 495 400
MLL telecom

THERAPYAUDIT

A provider of digital healthcare solutions for public health and secondary health sectors. THERAPYAUDIT services provide support to over 100k people across more than 35 NHS Trusts and public health sectors.

MLL Telecom were chosen to carry out the migration, and install the HSCN connection.

The Customer

THERAPYAUDIT is a provider of digital healthcare solutions for public health and secondary health sectors. THERAPYAUDIT offers a range of services, including blood test and vital signs monitoring and app-based digital therapeutics for people living with, and managing, chronic conditions.

One of THERAPYAUDIT’s services is TAMONITOR (also known as beetroot DMARD), a multi-specialty therapeutic blood test monitoring system, available to secondary care clinicians. TAMONITOR provides a complete solution, meeting clinical governance requirements for therapeutic drug monitoring. It works by collecting electronic blood results from clinical labs and storing them in a database. Blood results can then be checked for abnormalities, used to identify trends for deteriorating conditions, or audited to identify patients who haven’t attended blood testing sessions when expected. TAMONITOR increases operational efficiency by removing the manual task of creating and amending patient record cards from paper results.

THERAPYAUDIT’s services provide support for over 100,000 people, across more than 35 NHS Trusts and public health sites. THERAPYAUDIT currently operates in the UK and China.

The Challenge

In March 2018, THERAPYAUDIT migrated from the now-defunct N3 network, to the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN). They chose MLL Telecom to carry out the migration, and install the HSCN connection.

In July 2018, following a business decision to move to a new location in a fully managed complex, it was discovered that the new building did not allow new carriers to deploy circuits or infrastructure. THERAPYAUDIT found itself requiring a new solution that would replicate the design of its existing HSCN service in Newmarket, at reasonable cost. Finding such a solution was made challenging due to THERAPYAUDIT’s use of serviced or rented offices, removing the option of having a fixed site, accessible from a central location via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). In addition to this, THERAPYAUDIT wanted to avoid using the individual VPN tokens that were required when using the N3 network.

THERAPYAUDIT also needed a solution that made connecting to their customers’ intranet as seamless and quick as possible. Prior to the migration, each time THERAPYAUDIT staff were on a customer site, connecting to their intranet required approval from customer IT departments, access would then be granted via a daisy-chain of connections. This significantly impacted network latency and affected the team’s efficiency while on site with customers.

Particularly important was the need for a monitoring server, which was previously hosted within the office with access to the HSCN, to proactively check the pathology feeds of THERAPYAUDIT’s customers. Downtime in pathology feeds can put patient safety significantly at risk as clinicians are not receiving the most up-to-date blood test results. This can mean that patients who have attended their blood test are not recorded as having done so, thus forcing clinicians to waste valuable time chasing patients unnecessarily. Conversely, for patients who are recorded as having attended, delayed feeds will leave clinicians unaware of serious abnormalities or infections in a patient’s results.

Finally, THERAPYAUDIT needed a solution that would meet its future ambitions to offer its customers the ability to record patient data information via the HSCN connection.

The new solution needed to overcome these challenges, ensure that the migration would be as seamless as possible and be futureproofed for THERAPYAUDIT’s business.

The Solution

Given the solution’s complex requirements, MLL Telecom and THERAPYAUDIT worked collaboratively to come up with the best solution. Both companies worked together to understand the technical requirements as well as the potential issues that could occur as part of the migration.

This saw THERAPYAUDIT receive the following:

  • MLL Telecom set up a virtual machine, within their data centre, removing the dependency on a physical location and provided THERAPYAUDIT with the business flexibility it needs for the future.
  • MLL Telecom provided a connection from the virtual machine to the wider HSCN. This automatically gave THERAPYAUDIT safe and secure access to its customers’ networks. This has removed the need for THERAPYAUDIT staff to be granted access by individual IT teams at customer sites.
  • The virtual machine also acts as a monitoring server that allows THERAPYAUDIT to proactively check the pathology feeds of its customers, thus reducing the likelihood of pathology feed downtime.
  • MLL Telecom ensured that IP addresses did not change during the migration, which would have significantly impacted THERAPYAUDIT’s customers.

The Results

The initial migration from N3 to HSCN was successfully completed in March 2018, without major issues or disruption to THERAPYAUDIT’s customers. Subsequently the transfer of the service from THERAPYAUDIT’s office to MLL Telecom’s data centre was completed in November 2018 with minimal downtime.

The main benefit of the migration has been the increase in flexibility for the THERAPYAUDIT team, who work closely with customers and are often on-site to provide training or demos. Prior to the migration, accessing customers’ intranet was a difficult process, which took significant time and ate into the team’s productivity. Since the migration, THERAPYAUDIT has been able to access customers’ intranet easily and quickly, whether that be remotely, or from its office. This has allowed THERAPYAUDIT to redirect its attention back where it matters most: its customers.

In addition to this, the solution offered by MLL Telecom was far more cost efficient than alternative solutions, and the migration to a virtual machine located off-site has simplified future office moves for THERAPYAUDIT. What’s more using a hosted virtual machine has also allowed THERAPYAUDIT to futureproof its solution, particularly as it has removed the need for an additional HSCN server once THERAPYAUDIT embarks on its plans to offer customers the ability to record and collect patient data directly from the patients.