Supporting Hospice Care with Reliable IT Networks

In the hospice care sector, where primary focus is to provide comfort and dignity to patients in their final stages of life, technology plays a crucial yet often overlooked role. A robust IT infrastructure is essential for delivering high-quality services, ensuring that health providers can focus on what they do best - caring for their patients.

Data Security and Compliance: Safeguarding Sensitive Information

In any healthcare setting, protecting patient data is paramount, and hospices are no exception. Given the sensitive nature of end-of-life care, hospices have a legal duty to maintain confidentiality over the patient information they hold and process. They must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but also with the Access to Health Records Act (AHRA), which provides certain individuals with a right of access to health records.

A secure IT infrastructure can ensure that Electronic Patient Records (EPRs), patient communications, and other sensitive information is protected against data breach. However, the data cannot simply be ‘locked away’. Hospices also require secure, policy-controlled access to patient information to provide effective patient care, and to meet right of access requirements for next of kin.

The risk of nation-state cyber attacks continues to rise, and the adoption of new technologies is increasing the potential security attack surface. As a result, IT outages are expected to increase in frequency. To protect patient data during this turbulent period, healthcare organisations should ensure their network is not only robust, but configured for automatic failover across backup connections. Ideally, all traffic from connected endpoints should be routed through a security enforcement hub, where consistent policy can be applied across the entire network.

Network Reliability: Ensuring Continuous Care

In a hospice setting, network reliability is critical. Uninterrupted access to EPRs and critical applications ensures that healthcare providers can make informed decisions quickly and efficiently. Downtime, latency problems or network failures can lead to delays in care, potentially affecting patient outcomes.

Hospices have limited budgets and rely heavily on charity funding. HospiceUK estimates there is a collective deficit of £77 million for the 2023/24 financial year across the UK Hospice sector. This highlights the importance of getting maximum return on investment. With these limited resources in mind, it's essential to choose an IT networking supplier who can be trusted to provide consistent network reliability and add the most value. This includes the provision of skilled experts to support the supplier’s network services. With these specialised skills becoming increasingly scarce, selecting a provider with the necessary expertise is more important than ever.

Scalability: Adapting to Growing Needs

As the demand for hospice care continues to grow, with 90% of the population requiring palliative care, so too must the IT infrastructure that supports it. A hospice’s IT team may need access to a number of applications, from workforce scheduling, to inventory, reporting and risk management tools. These workloads are likely hosted in more than one cloud provider, or a blend of cloud and on premise locations.

Access to multiple cloud providers is a key consideration for any hospice looking to expand its services or integrate new technologies into its operations. A flexible IT network can easily adapt to these changing needs, whether that means adding more sites and users to the network, or incorporating cloud connections to support new business applications.

Partnering for Success

By partnering with an IT network provider who understands these challenges, hospices can enhance their services and focus on what truly matters - providing comfort and dignity to their patients. Whether it's ensuring data security, maintaining network reliability, scaling to meet growing needs, or providing ongoing support, a strong IT infrastructure is essential for success in hospice care. Talk to a member of our team if you need support and advice and we’ll be happy to guide you.