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The Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (formerly the Swindon and Marlborough NHS Trust) provides health services from two main sites - the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, which is a district general hospital, and Savernake Hospital in Marlborough.

The trust was formed in 1994, employs 3,300 staff and serves a population of about 300,000 people on an annual turnover of Ł156 million.

During this time the Great Western IT infrastructure has continually evolved with many disparate systems linked by one off bespoke interfaces.

These one off interfaces presented the trust with a number of ongoing issues

Increased support overhead
High risk interfaces and fragile changes
Bespoke and complex disaster recovery
General performance issues
A frequent requirement for manual processing
A growing need for HL7 interfaces

In 2009 the trust built a business case to solve these issues using an integration engine. After an in-depth investigation the trust selected Intersystems Ensemble as the best product for their requirements.

With no experience of Ensemble the Trust chose to use ReStart Consulting to help them lower their risks, improve delivery and achieve a full knowledge transfer of Ensemble.

During this process ReStart was able to replace a number of bespoke interfaces whilst training on site staff to take full ownership of the Ensemble development process.

ReStart were able to deliver this project on time in just eight weeks with no impact to other Great Western projects.

The trust has since presented a number of key benefits to this successful installation including...

A robust and supportable solution
Real time data synchronisation
Reduced maintenance overheads
Common standards across all interfaces
Robust interfacing platform, and
Robust and simpler disaster recovery options