iomart Lands on MARS

The organisation which created a ground-breaking online appraisal system for the 6,300 doctors working in Wales has been explaining how it turned to cloud company iomart to meet data security and compliance issues.

Wales Deanery, which is the School of Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education at Cardiff University, established the Medical Appraisal and Revalidation System (MARS) in conjunction with the Welsh Government. MARS has been confirmed by the Welsh Government as the single appraisal system for all non-training doctors in Wales.

MARS meets the General Medical Council (GMC) Good Medical Practice Framework requirements for doctor revalidation through one standard I.T. system. It operates through two separate websites: one for doctors working in General Practice or Primary Care and one for doctors in Secondary Care which covers all non-training grade doctors such as medical consultants in hospitals.

Paul Kirk, Business Systems Support Unit Manager for Wales Deanery, explains, "We realised we needed much stronger Service Level Agreements around the project because of its importance for the NHS in Wales and for the University. When our previous hosting contract came up for renewal, we took the opportunity to evaluate a number of different providers in a stringent tender exercise and iomart came out on top.”

iomart was chosen to host MARS after proving it could help the Wales Deanery project to meet the UK Information Commissioner’s requirements and could provide a responsive, scalable managed service backed by dedicated technical support.

iomart provides a dedicated hosting environment using Dell R320-Intel Xeon Hex-core servers, protected by a managed Cisco ASA 5505 firewall with end-point protection. It also provides managed off-site backup and restore using EMC Avamar for more than 1.5TB of storage.

Further pilot projects are currently underway and an enhanced version of MARS will be being rolled out in 2016.

To read the full MARS case study click here

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About iomart:

Award winning cloud company Iomart Group PLC (AIM: IOM) enables businesses and organisations to operate their online data and IT environments safely and securely. Headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, iomart partners with leading vendors such as VMware, Amazon, EMC, Microsoft, Asigra and Dell to offer customers a centrally managed, controlled and completely agnostic set of hybrid, private and public cloud platforms. By owning a global network and datacentre infrastructure, iomart can support any customer who wishes to move seamlessly between any and all of these platforms with a consultative level of knowledge and expertise, delivering cloud services to meet exact business needs. For more information visit www.iomart.com