iTrinegy Ensures Application Performance for NHS in Yorkshire, England 
NHS West and South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit implements iTrinegy’s AppQoS to ensure delivery of data to geographically dispersed GP Clinics in Northern Britain.
Cambridge, UK, Reno Nevada, USA – February 6, 2014. iTrinegy, the global provider of award-winning application performance management (APM) and network replication technology and services, has recently helped ensure the performance of networked applications for local clinics in NHS West, South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit’s catchment area.
The Commissioning Support Unit utilizes an extensive network that links over 500 GP surgeries and clinics, serving a population of 3.9m people within the area. It also provides connectivity to centrally stored national data, which is accessed through a myriad of secure networks.
Ensuring good access to all services regardless of network conditions is the remit of the Commissioning Support Unit’s Network Division. It is tasked with making sure that the performance of the data is at optimum and easily accessible to the right departments. Poor performance of the systems quickly generates frustration and subsequent complaints amongst the users which need to be resolved quickly and securely.
“One of our Practice Managers contacted us regarding the apparent slowdown of the Hosted Clinical system. This slowdown was causing severe disruption within the practice and was having a direct impact on patient care. As the Trust is responsible for the local LAN we began to investigate the cause of the problem. Early checks indicated that all was well with the local switches and other networked devices, we needed to conduct a more thorough investigation to get to the cause of the problem,” said Paul Simms, Network Support Manager for the Network division.
In a network of this size, there are many places where a fault might lie and the issue is how to identify poor application performance quickly. Traditional Network Protocol Analyzers can be used for this purpose but the extremely high volumes of data they typically generate do not make them particularly suitable to rapid resolution of performance issues. AppQoS, by comparison, provides the right blend of detail of application performance and network utilization information to quickly pinpoint the true cause of slow response times.
AppQoS analyses all traffic on monitored network segments and delivers, in real-time, application-level visibility without the need for hosted agents. It initially provides high level network session analysis for each and every network transaction over both local and remote (disparate) networks and then the ability to drilldown to deliver more granular application performance and health information. The NHS introduced AppQoS into their network environment where it monitored all client-server interactions, for the affected network segments, where it rapidly isolated the problem.
“We deployed iTrinegy’s AppQoS device onto the local network and began to monitor network performance over a period of seven days. We quickly established that the Clinical Systems response times over the NHS national network were well within acceptable levels – the cause of the performance problem was identified and quickly resolved”. Paul continues, “AppQoS was able to produce a definitive list of the users and devices that had caused the bandwidth bottlenecks. After consultation with the Practice Manager and staff we quickly restored system access. AppQoS has been used on a number of sites with similar performance related problems – all with positive outcomes.”
About NHS West and South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit
NHS West and South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit is an award-winning provider of professional services, including commissioning and business management support, across west and south Yorkshire and Bassetlaw. They provide outstanding business solutions and ensure that their customer’s interests are at the heart of their business. With an entrepreneurial business culture and innovation playing a key part in everything they do, they have built their success of the knowledge gained from their business and relationship with their clients. At present they provide services to the 15 clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) across West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw, representing over 500 GP practices and servicing a population of 3.9m. They also provide a range of commissioning support series to NHS England which has its national support centre in Leeds.
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