Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is the leading provider of eye health services in the UK and a world-class centre of excellence for ophthalmic research and education with a reputation developed over two centuries for providing the highest quality ophthalmic care.

The main focus is the treatment and care of NHS patients with a wide range of eye problems, from common complaints to rare conditions that require treatment not available elsewhere in the UK. Moorfields operate at 29 locations in and around London.

Moorfields Eye Hospital were the first trust in England to migrate to HSCN, with their first of 12 circuits going live in December 2017 and completing their migration journey in December 2019.

Moorfields use a number of clinical systems to provide patient care and also to access Spine services such as Patient Demographic Service, e-referral (ERS) and Child Protection Information Sharing.

Prior to migrating to HSCN with their chosen supplier MLL Telecom, Moorfields were constrained by the bandwidth provided by N3. As a specialist hospital virtually all patients receive imaging studies, which results in files of approximately 15MB; moving these across the network over N3 was problematic. A large number of images are stored locally as they couldn’t be transferred easily or accessed readily – this also introduced a security risk with images not being held centrally. Workarounds were in place by manual image transfer in some instances and reliance on paper records as a back up.

Following the migration to HSCN Moorfields increased their capacity at the satellite sites from 10MB to 100MB – a 10-fold increase in speed with no increase in cost with the capacity to quickly increase to 1GB if required. Moorfields also have also upgraded to a 1GB link at their central site.

Following migration to HSCN, all images can be captured at the branch sites and transferred over the network to the central image store at the main hospital site with no bandwidth restrictions.

Migrating to HSCN will enable Moorfields to adopt a new model of distributed care allowing high street optometrists to participate – a vision which commissioners in London are pushing for.

Currently cataract patients can be treated in Moorfields and then receive their follow up care by a high street optometrist, who need  to access  shared image records at the point of care. The future vision of this model is not just for cataract patients but for other eye conditions such as glaucoma. HSCN is an enabler for these high street optometrists who have previously found the cost of N3 to be a barrier in terms of accessing national systems and services. This model of care is currently being trialled in Bedford and Croydon. 

For the long-term strategy, Moorfields are currently considering cloud storage using HSCN as the enabler.