University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust is using performance management technology to improve information access and reduce application downtime.

The Trust, which runs two hospitals in the Birmingham area providing treatment for over 553,000 patients annually, also wants insight into how systems are running and plans to increase its use of virtualisation technology.

With shared applications serving everything from patient records to payroll accounts on multiple sites, NetIQ AppManager will enable the Trust to monitor performance from a client perspective and measure email, network and database transaction performance.

The intelligence will help the Trust provide high availability and manage the performance of its applications.

It already had tools to monitor hardware, but chose NetIQ to monitor at an application level for capacity management purposes to see trends for CPU and disk utilisation.

Stephen Chilton, technical architecture manager for IT services at University Hospital Birmingham, said: ‘Reliable technology is critical to servicing our patients efficiently. A world-class healthcare facility needs not only to foresee and fix problems with accessing patient and medical information, but also predict future capacity requirements.’

‘We had a real requirement to monitor application availability and performance to underpin our service improvement initiatives.’

Chilton says the Trust plans to user more virtualisation technology, maximising resources and reducing operational costs.

‘Virtualisation technology will further impact the way we run the servers to support the network. The NetIQ implementation will help us with the intelligence to understand what is going on in the system to enable us to leverage leading edge technology,’ he said.