Barts Health NHS Trust

Apogee chosen for a second generation of Managed Service as a result of ongoing service improvements and process efficiencies whilst delivering cash savings.

The Background

With a turnover of £1.25 billion and a workforce of 15,000, Barts Health is the largest NHS trust in the country, and one of Britain’s leading healthcare providers. Barts Health offers the full range of local hospital and community health services – from one of the biggest maternity services in the country, to compassionate end of life care at home.

The Trust’s hospitals are home to world-renowned specialist centres, including cancer, cardiac and trauma and emergency care, as well as one of Britain’s biggest children’s hospitals. The Royal London is also the base of London’s Air Ambulance, one of the world’s leading pre-hospital medical services for victims of serious injury.

Apogee initially started engagement with the Trust in 2010 when Old Whitechapel Hospital was about to be rebuilt and become the state of the art Royal London Hospital. The Trust’s solution was lacking innovation and they were experiencing issues in management of consumables and supplies. Staff were also wasting their time having to deal with invoice queries.

Production Print magnifying glass over photos

The Solution

Apogee introduced a Managed Print Service to the Trust which was a new concept to them. We worked within the Trust’s budget to provide the number of devices they needed for the new build project without rationalisation at this stage.

Apogee worked in partnership with the Trust to agree an all-inclusive service click charge to manage the service. We were also able to demonstrate an immediate cost saving through VAT recovery.

The Royal London Hospital build project was running behind schedule, but our Project Management team were able to roll out the new devices in a much shorter timescale and ensured everything was up and running ahead of the hospital opening.

The Outcome

The fleet of devices was rolled out within a tight timeframe only six weeks in accordance with the Trust’s deadlines. Following installation, Apogee’s Professional Services team carried out an audit of all other sites and were able to put forward a compelling business case for the Trust to move to a fully outsourced Managed Print Service. As part of our proposal we included a “Follow-Me” print solution for general areas of the hospitals to assist with their secure print aspirations.

In 2014 Barts Health joined with Whips Cross and Newham Hospitals and as part of the novation into the existing contract, a technology refresh was completed. By this stage we had created an onsite support team of five engineers who between them, were looking after over 2,000 devices.

The Trust went out to tender in 2018 looking for a technology refresh and to introduce secure print release on non community MFDs. The Trust decided to re-award the contract to Apogee and we were keen to further develop our partnership. We introduced a fleet of HP LaserJet devices which were easier to use than the legacy fleet and provided full interoperability with our remote monitoring software.

A 'Print Detective' from Apogee was implemented and utilised to speak to the individual departments and gain an understanding of their current workflows, print, and document management and we were able to drive a cost saving of £100k saving from the Trust’s operating expense.

The Trust is benefitting from exceptional uptime and full integration into their own IT helpdesk and internal logging system called Infra was working well as per the below process:

End user raises a call with the helpdesk
The call is passed to our onsite engineers. Mobile technology allows them to quickly see the calls, monitor and prioritised
Once resolved, the calls are then cleared down.

2018 Service Highlights

Number of machines: 2151
Average Response Time: 3:32
First Time Fix %: 98.2%
Overall Uptime: 99.6%

To combat issues surrounding toner and consumable reordering, Apogee introduced automated consumable management via software and our onsite engineers managed all consumables for the Trust. The onsite team now have a vast amount of experience of working with the Trust and are seen as part of the organisation.

We now have a thorough understanding of the Trust’s processes and workflows which has enabled us to build a solution tailored and bespoke to their organisation. The service has dramatically improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the managed print service as a whole.

Benefits of re-awarding to Apogee for 2nd contract term

Bespoke toner replenishment system continues to ensure reduced downtime
No part of the service is outsourced
Longevity of the service means that the Trust knows how the service works and the cost of change would have been very high
Cost saving on the technology refresh due to rationalisation