Tunstall Case Study
Tunstall Healthcare UK Ltd
Established in the UK in 1957, Tunstall is the world’s leading provider of telehealthcare solutions. Operating in 30 countries and employing over 1000 people, Tunstall supports 2.5m people around the world.
Tunstall primarily works with local authorities and both public and private social care providers to provide supportive technologies to anyone requiring support and reassurance such as older people or those with long term needs, to lead an independent life.
The market in which Tunstall operates is both competitive and heavily reliant on government policy. Therefore Tunstall is actively involved in a number of working groups pushing forward ideas and solutions for the furtherance of social care technologies.
In late 2008, Tunstall launched a new Telehealth solution to assist clinical practitioners in the monitoring of various medical vital signs necessary for the management of conditions such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Our technology allows for vital signs to be collected each day from patients in their own homes and sent electronically to a central database. This database can then be queried by clinicians and medical observations made from the data. Together with face to face meetings, this can provide greater insight into the patient’s condition and the effectiveness of treatment.
The service is delivered over both the NHS N3 network and over the public internet. The GrIDsure solution was selected to provide authentication services for access over the public internet.
As the UK IS Director for Tunstall, my responsibilities include ensuring that our perimeters are secure and that personal and/or medical data is processed and held in an appropriate, safe and legal way. We also need to be able to do this in the most efficient and manageable way available. We therefore spent a number of months looking into multi-factor solutions and during this search we came across the GrIDsure solution.
What struck us immediately about the GrIDsure solution was how easy it was to administer. One of the major issues we have struggled with using other solutions has been the cost and management of tokens. With the GrIDsure solution these issues seemed to disappear and licensing was simple and straightforward, so with the agreement of Tunstall management, we setup a pilot.
During the pilot stage we found we needed assistance from GrIDsure to integrate with our Telehealth platform. We asked and help quickly came. A refreshing change and one I doubt would have been so easily solicited from a larger provider.
The internal pilot stage is now complete and has been approved for a controlled release to a small selection of our customers in readiness for the rollout proper early next year.
We have been so impressed with the GrIDsure product that Tunstall has become a reseller and intend to offer it as an add-on to a number of our other Telecare/Telehealth products next year.
In summary, the GrIDsure solution has provided Tunstall with an authentication mechanism that can be deployed quickly across a number of different platforms. Once the end user grasps the principle of the pattern grid then they seem to require little support. Calls to our helpdesk on GrIDsure related issues have been few and far between, a marked contrast to previous solutions.
Dr. Jonathan Cain
UK IS Director
Tunstall Healthcare UK Ltd
October 2009.
