How HPE Synergy brought huge NHS cost savings and DevOps strategy to medical records firm EMIS Group

"Efficiency means saving the NHS more money," claims technical solutions manager

Medical records firm EMIS Group has been singing the praises of HPE's "composable infrastructure" platform HPE Synergy, boasting legitimate NHS cost-saving results and an acceleration into DevOps for its IT function.

Speaking in a newly-launched case study video from HPE, EMIS Health technical solutions manager David Gee describes how the simplified IT approach of Synergy enabled "groundbreaking DevOps".

"[Synergy gave us a] push to integrate engineering with the software engineering side of the business. And Synergy is a next step on that process of allowing the hosted infrastructure teams to provide new services and new capabiltiies rapidly to the developers."

Gee explained how not spending "individual human resource time" to build out "physical pieces of tin" allowed processes to be automated, to great success.

"That allows us to commit those members of staff to work on inccidents and problems in the infrastructure, as well as improving services," said Gee.

Synergy thus also allows more flexibility for EMIS Group to deploy new infsrastructure, and lets it introduce new DevOps features as it goes along.

"This frees up resources for legacy systems as well as offering a compute and storage stack where in the future we'll be much quicker to move services from legacy platforms to Synergy." Gee enthused.

Synergy allows "more rapid-scaling of infrastructure, or "bursting" out to EMIS' existing 3PAR fibre-channel storage arrays.

"We can be much more expansive with the services we can provide," confirmed Gee.

"The absolute aim," he confirmed, "at all times is to improve efficiency and patient care - quicker means saving the NHS more money."

Nobody can argue with this noble outcome, of course.

One particular service user advantage has also become apparent. It's known as the "Share your own records" service, and allows patients to select elements of their own medical data and, via a QR code, allow a health provider 24-hour access to the information. Speed, of course, is paramount when diagnosing and treating health concerns.

"The quicker we can do that, the bigger the benefit for everyone as a result," said Gee.