Sunrise customer for over 15 years

30,000+ NHS professionals across 280 sites
Handles 132,000 IT service requests per year with 24/7 support

Who are Informatics Merseyside?
Informatics Merseyside is an NHS shared service providing Information Management and Technology (IM&T) services to healthcare organisations across the local health and social care economy.
Established in 2006, the organisation brought together staff from six NHS Trusts to deliver centralised IT services, supporting around 18,000 users across specialist NHS trusts, clinical commissioning groups, general practitioners and professional bodies.

Today, it operates one of the largest IT service desks in the NHS, handling around 132,000 requests per year and providing 24-hour support to healthcare professionals. Its goal is to deliver “health-grade IT” that enables efficient, high-quality patient care.

What Informatics Merseyside was looking to achieve
The creation of Informatics Merseyside was driven by the UK Government’s push for shared services to improve efficiency and economies of scale across the NHS.
Previously, each of the six NHS Trusts operated its own service desk management software. The new organisation needed to consolidate these into a single, unified platform that could support a centralised IT service.

Key objectives included:
•    Improving operational efficiency by removing duplicate systems
•    Delivering a consistent, high-quality service to healthcare users
•    Aligning IT services with ITIL best practice
•    Providing a flexible platform capable of supporting innovation and automation

Following an extensive tender process, Informatics Merseyside selected Sunrise ITSM for its adaptability, cost effectiveness and ability to support a distributed service team across multiple locations. The solution went live in 2007.

How Sunrise helped them achieve this
Over more than a decade, Sunrise has provided the foundation for Informatics Merseyside’s evolving service management strategy.

The platform supports the organisation’s Shift Left strategy, which focuses on automating routine tasks so service desk staff can focus on more complex issues. Sunrise enables the team to continually improve service delivery while introducing new tools and channels for users.

Key capabilities include:
Automation and service innovation
Sunrise underpins a range of automated processes that were previously manual, including:
•    Automated password reset through user authentication
•    Instant access permission provisioning for NHS systems
•    Workflow automation that significantly reduces request fulfilment time

Digital service experience
The organisation has also used Sunrise to build an equipment request portal, offering a digital “shopping-style” experience where users can request software, hardware and services while automatically building a supporting business case.

Integrated service desk operations
Sunrise integrates with multiple technologies to improve service delivery, including:
•    Live chat support integrated with incident management
•    Remote support tools
•    Pop-up notifications for major incidents
•    Telephony integration to streamline user interactions

These integrations ensure Informatics Merseyside maintains a single, consistent incident management process across all service channels.

The Results
Using Sunrise as its service management platform has enabled Informatics Merseyside to deliver measurable improvements in both efficiency and user experience.

Key outcomes include:
•    Supporting 18,000+ users across the regional healthcare ecosystem
•    Managing 132,000 service requests per year
•    Achieving 98% customer satisfaction with the service desk
•    Automating previously manual processes, saving significant staff time
•    Enabling new digital services and self-service capabilities

The organisation also became the first NHS IT service desk in England to achieve 3-star certification from the Service Desk Institute (SDI) in 2015.

Sunrise provides the data, reporting and process framework required to support these best practice standards.

Conclusion
For over a decade, Sunrise ITSM has helped Informatics Merseyside transform its service desk into a modern, highly efficient shared service supporting healthcare professionals across the region.
By providing a flexible and adaptable platform, Sunrise has enabled the organisation to automate processes, introduce new digital services and continuously improve the user experience.

As the Head of IT Service Operations, explains:
“We originally chose Sunrise over ten years ago, and it has proven to be a flexible, powerful platform across our evolving activities.”
Through this long-standing partnership, Informatics Merseyside has built a service desk that not only delivers operational efficiency, but also supports ongoing innovation across the NHS digital landscape.