Splunk helps NHS Choices keep healthcare online
Platform helps to improve NHS website performance
Splunk has announced that NHS Choices is using Splunk Enterprise to improve website performance.
The Splunk platform provides NHS Choices with the data visibility it needs to help understand how users interact with the website, enabling it to streamline access to wider NHS Services as well as critical healthcare information.
Launched in 2007, NHS Choices is the official website of the National Health Service in England, delivered by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, soon to be renamed NHS Digital. It is the UK’s biggest health website, with 48 million visits a month, and aims to be a world-leading, multi-channel service for individuals looking to engage with the NHS.
“The healthcare industry is undergoing a significant transformation, with IT increasingly placed at the forefront of innovative initiatives to improve patient care. Data of all forms is increasingly looked to for insights that can help improve efficiency and in turn patient results,” said Rick Fitz, senior vice president of IT markets at Splunk.
“By being able to streamline traditionally resource intensive IT tasks through Splunk Enterprise, the healthcare industry is able to focus more time and resources on patient needs, while having more information available with which to make better-informed strategic decisions.”
NHS Choices is using Splunk Enterprise across its website infrastructure to help find the root cause of issues affecting the website, ensuring that valuable healthcare information and resources are always available to the public. This ranges from detecting when an area is unresponsive to users, to ensuring that upgrades do not have any unforeseen impacts across the business. The Splunk platform is also used to manage the often-unpredictable flow of traffic that can hit the website due to specific health campaigns or illnesses being mentioned in the media. Through Splunk Enterprise, the NHS Choices team can now identify the specific 60-second window when a spike in traffic hits the website, as well as being able to identify any impact caused as a result. This provides the NHS Choices team with a wealth of reporting information that helps it to better target future health campaigns, deliver more relevant services for users as well as providing greater insight into overall website performance.
