NHS trust chooses thin client

A West Yorkshire NHS trust has replaced PCs with thin clients to meet the government's 2002 deadline for providing clinical information online.

The Dewsbury trust wanted electronic patient records, appointment bookings and prescriptions. It also needed to link staff to the countrywide NHSnet, but needed to update its infrastructure.

Even with government money for modernisation, a PC-based system would have been too expensive, according to IT manager Hans Solgaard. So Dewsbury installed a new Ethernet network with 200 Wyse Winterm thin client terminals.

The process took less than 90 days, a quarter of the time it would have taken with PCs, said Solgaard.

The thin client network has allowed the trust to standardise on a common platform, giving staff access to up-to-date information from any terminal, and to accelerate the delivery of new services to patients.

"We couldn't have done it using PCs because the total cost of ownership would have been too high," explained Solgaard.

Security was another important consideration. The new system has reduced the threat of viruses because applications run on a central, password-controlled server.

The key consideration for similar projects is to ensure adequate planning and to make users feel comfortable with any changes, said Solgaard.