Hosted OPAS Environment ...

"The occupational health Department at Frimley Park hospital has now been running the hosted OPAS system provided by Warwick IC systems for about a year. Prior to that time the system was managed on a server by the local IT department at the Hospital.

As part as the original setup the department spent some time evaluating a test system which was deemed to be satisfactory for our needs. Since the system has been "live" the occupational health Department at Frimley Park hospital has been extremely pleased with the way it is hosted and managed. It is almost impossible to identify that the database is being managed remotely since the refresh time is actually less than when we were using the server on-site.

Support from Warwick IC systems for this service has been excellent; any small problems have been ironed out without any difficulty. We recently upgraded to the latest version and are now planning to improve the occupational health database system by the use of the new mail merge service which is available in the upgraded version. Because we are not able to directly access the database, Warwick IC systems have set up Excel spreadsheets for us through the same server which enables us to manage the data and obtain reports without any difficulty.

As far as costs are concerned; the setup costs was considerably less than was being asked by the internal IT department for a server and support. This was one the reasons we decided to explore the possibility of a hosted service. Annual fees and support from Warwick IC systems are extremely reasonable.

I would recommend that occupational health services explore this possibility not only from a financial point of view but also the knowledge that the database is backed up and secure if there are any problems with the hardware within the local OH Department."

Dr R Drury, Occupational Health Department, Frimley Park Hospital