CNWL upgraded operations to provide essential health services remotely

A noticeable difference 

Following the successful initial transition by November 2019, CNWL saw immediate improvements to its existing operations.

“The impact on my day-to-day work was instant,” explained Tracy White, Associate Director for Information and Business at CNWL. “I think we had all been worn down by our existing technology and didn’t think to expect any different, and all of a sudden we had systems that could actually do what they were supposed to do — it was an enormous relief! One particular task of mine was generally taking me the best part of a day to complete, so five or six working hours. When we moved to Rackspace Technology, that came down to two hours, just because the system was so much more responsive and could process everything as it should. When something is that immediately obvious and quantifiable, you have the confidence to know you’ve made the right decision.”

“All the pain has been removed from our usual processes,” added Dr Simon Edwards, Divisional Medical Director at CNWL. “We’d all just grown weary of our previous systems and had built into our days the amount of time it took to file notes, for example. Now it all works like it should — which, most importantly, allows us to focus on our clinical work and our patients.”

Underpinning online health services

The positive transformation in working practices supported by the migration was reinforced when the COVID-19 pandemic required the organization to quickly shift to a remote working model.

“To be honest, I don’t think we’d have managed to function if we hadn’t changed to Rackspace Technology so recently,” said Powell. “We’d have found a way, but the newfound confidence we had in our processes definitely helped. Most of what we do is on premises with in-person healthcare so while a few people might work from home throughout the week, we have not generally operated remotely because we’ve never had to. Overnight, we went from about 200 people who work from home to 2,000 remote workers. Many of our clinics closed as staff were redeployed to help elsewhere. By any standards, that is an enormous upheaval, but there was never any issue with scaling to that requirement with Rackspace Technology and our operations were, from a technological standpoint, unaffected by the lockdown, which is remarkable.”

The lockdown has in fact proved useful as a testbed for CNWL to identify how new technological solutions can support it in providing its core services. In particular, certain more personal or sensitive healthcare areas, like sexual health, could see a long term move to online solutions, retaining the discretion many patients desire far more easily than in-person visits.

“Information security is a key part of providing sexual health services, and the move to an online model fully supports this, and is more cost-effective as well,” explained Powell. “The pandemic has allowed us to make great advances in how we interact with these patients, with online tests and prescriptions as well as demos and consults over video calls. There are also transactional type services we provide that don’t need a personal touch and could be automated.

“The big change we’ve seen is that our technology now allows us to lead the way with these changes, thanks to our interfaces and our system’s robustness. We are doing more remotely than we ever thought possible, largely through necessity, but with technology no longer a barrier, we will keep a lot more of this going moving forward.”