NHS Norfolk Community Trust provides community-based NHS health and care via more than 70 different service locations across Norfolk, England, serving a population of nearly 900,000 people.
The Story
Ensure Reliable Connectivity for Nurses in the Field
The NHS Norfolk Community Trusts’ 800 nurses can visit more than 8,000 patients in a day. Reporting care at the point of delivery is seen as efficient and ultimately provides better patient outcomes. However, with patchy and unreliable 3G/4G connections, nurses found that data would regularly be lost and often spent valuable time logging back into the secure network. With up to 600 connectivity incident reports being logged each week, the mobile solution which was supposed to help them became a barrier to providing care. For nurses visiting patients, the focus needs to be on providing care rather than dealing with connectivity issues.
Security Challenges
Seamless
Connectivity
Improved
Patient Care
Reduced
Incident Reports
"The difference Absolute Secure Access provides is clear to see. When connectivity matters there is no other solution which does so completely what they do. From the support they provide to the continual enhancements in product features—it truly is a life saver. Without Absolute Secure Access, our mobile working solution was simply not fit for purpose. Unreliable data connectivity resulting in data loss make the job of reporting patient care at the point of contact virtually impossible."
PAUL WALSH
INFRASTRUCTURE CONSULTANT
NHS NORFOLK COMMUNITY TRUST
The Solutions
How They Did It
Improve Efficiency in the Clinical Workflow
Absolute Secure Access has been seamlessly deployed on all Windows laptops for community care nurses in the field and those based at rehabilitation centres located throughout the community. Absolute Secure Access ensures that even when there are mobile connectivity dropouts, applications and crucially, data access is maintained. Patient records are updated immediately, and nurses can focus on care and not reporting technical connectivity issues.
Provide Critical Support in the Anywhere Workforce
Absolute Secure Access has also been installed on the laptops of the Trusts’ administration staff to ensure they remain always connected and are able to provide critical support as they work from home following the COVID-19 outbreak, taking the total number of Absolute Secure Access licenses to over 2,000.
Reduce Incident Reports with Seamless Remote Access
For NHS Norfolk Community Trust, Absolute Secure Access helped reduce the number of mobile-related incident reports. Paul Walsh, Infrastructure Consultant at NHS Norfolk Community Trust, says: “We have gone from over 600 mobile-related incident reports of connectivity and data loss issues a week to a handful since installing Absolute Secure Access. Put simply, Absolute Secure Access enables our community nurses to get on with the job of caring and not worrying about losing their work.”
The Results
Reduced Incident Reports = Improved Patient Care
Absolute Secure Access now underpins and is central to NHS Norfolk Community Trust’s mobile working programme. Consistent, secure connectivity is a ‘must have’ not a ‘nice to have’ requirement to enable those working out in the community to report on the care programmes they are delivering. The Absolute Secure Access platform prioritizes users, devices, and applications so nurses have access to the records they need, when they need it.
For the NHS Norfolk Community Trust team, Absolute Secure Access:
- Provides secure remote access in the field, mitigating data loss via dropped connections
- Ensures nurses stay connected, meaning more time spent caring for patient
- Reduces mobile-related incident reports from 600 to less than five a week
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
Like what you're hearing?
We’d love to show you how Absolute can secure and empower your organization.
Looking for more information? Join a product overview webinar
Not ready for a demo? Have some questions?