NHS SLaM: Modernizing Mental Healthcare For All
Challenges
- Planning and execution of a new NHS SLaM strategy
- A global pandemic
- Growing mental health concerns
- Fractured view of the IT architecture
- Reliance on Microsoft® Word documents and manual work for solution design
Results
- Fully automated enterprise architecture management
- Increased team productivity by 20% (= 1 FTE)
- Foundation laid for holistic view of all projects and initiatives
- Better use of clinical capital by streamlining IT
- More agile IT to accelerate innovation
- Ability to leverage a competent partner as the extended arm of the architecture team
Meet our customer hero
The South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust provides the widest range of mental health and drug and alcohol addiction services in the UK. Its staff serves a local population of over 1.3 million people, providing 260 services. SLaM is part of an academic science center partnering with Kings College London, and the only mental health trust in the UK with its own biomedical research center.
The global COVID pandemic created a sense of digital urgency. We needed a centralized view of our architecture in terms of applications, technology and projects. We got it in just eight weeks and are already moving forward quickly on governance.
— Milos Kresojevic | Senior Information Architect, NHS SLaM
Technology to improve mental healthcare
The South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust is widely considered one of the top mental health institutions in the world. In 2021, the Trust wanted to harness technology better to improve the lives of the people who rely on it most. Being a government organization with private partnerships, such as one with Kings College London, SLaM faced unique challenges that went to the core of its business and enterprise architectures.
“We had new interest and requirements to work from home because of the global COVID pandemic,” says Milos Kresojevic, the Senior Innovation Architect at NHS SLaM who oversees the project. “So we had to be extremely agile in developing new applications to support this while providing the same level of support. To do this, our solution developers needed better architectural guidance—quickly.”
The SLaM team reached out to Bruhati—local partners in enterprise architecture and design thinking. Bruhati captured and generated documentation of NHS SLaM’s e-prescription system in Bizzdesign Alfabet to demonstrate how high-level solutions can be quickly designed with the information held in the product’s repository. The concept beat every other vendor by a distance.
In production, that success started with a fast, 8-week implementation of a highly automated enterprise architecture tool. Kresojevic’s team, which used to rely primarily on Microsoft® Word docs to manage design projects, —now achieves all the same things and more with the Bizzdesign Alfabet-based solution Bruhati created for NHS SLaM.
Solution
- Bizzdesign Alfabet
- Cumulocity IoT
