THE CUSTOMER
London Vision Clinic is a world renowned Harley Street, Laser Eye Surgery Clinic with a reputation for outstanding results. London Vision Clinic provides industry leading treatments including the keyhole small incision lenticule extraction (SMILE) procedure and PRESBYOND Laser Blended Vision for patients with presbyopia.
The surgical team led by London Vision Clinic’s founder, Prof Dan Reinstein, pride themselves on being innovators and pioneers in the field of laser eye surgery. Their drive for innovation led to them being involved in the development of both SMILE and PRESBYOND, and Prof Reinstein invented the world’s most accurate scanner for measuring the outer layer of the human eye (the cornea).
A core focus of the team at London Vision Clinic is research and have published almost 200 articles in the scientific literature. Led by Oxford and Cambridge University graduate Dr Tim Archer, the research team closely analyzes the outcome of every procedure and uses modern techniques such as data modelling to identify new techniques and technologies to further drive innovation and improve patient safety and results.
THE CHALLENGE
To aid the research undertaken by London Vision Clinic, as well as to train, develop and review the surgical team, all surgical procedures are captured on camera. Using high definition cameras to capture the surgeries, these are then stored and labelled onto DVDs and stored in a secure location.
London Vision Clinic recognised that with advancement in technology, combined with the volume of DVD recordings of surgical procedures there could be a more efficient and cost-effective method to archive video recordings digitally.
London Vision Clinic got in touch with Green Custard to discuss a method for migrating their thousands of previously recorded surgical procedures into a digital archive within the AWS Cloud. In addition to this London Vision Clinic also wanted an application that would allow the theatre team to ‘effortlessly’ capture future surgical recordings straight into the cloud together with relevant labelling.
Security of the video files was of the utmost importance. Digital files also needed to be kept in a searchable and organised structure so that they could be easily located by patient name, surgeon, procedure, date and so on.
THE SOLUTION
One of Green Custard’s Project Lead’s, who is both an AWS Solutions Architect and AWS Security Specialist, headed up the project and worked closely with Tim to understand the project's requirements.
There were two independent aspects of the project that were dealt with independently.
The first was to provide London Vision Clinic with a piece of software that would take the pre-recorded DVD video files and convert them to a cloud ready format. The software would then enable the user at London Vision Clinic to enter the details related to the video file before automatically uploading them to secure storage within Amazon’s S3 Cloud Storage Solution using AWS File Storage Gateway.
The second was to provide London Vision Clinic with an attractive, reliable, efficient and user-friendly piece of software that can be used to record future surgeries from the theatres, straight into a digital format and over to the cloud thus mitigating the need for the further use of DVD recordings. Furthermore, the user experience was heavily considered to make the interaction with the software as light touch as possible and fit into the workflow of the surgical team.
During the Discovery phase of the project, it was identified that a list was produced daily setting out the scheduled surgeries for the day. The list included all of the relevant information (such as patient, surgeon, procedure, etc) that also needed to be captured against each video recording. To make the process as simple as possible the software was designed to import this list to eliminate any duplication of work.
At the start of each procedure, the operator would simply need to select the patient from the pre-populated list on screen, and press record. On completion of the procedure, they would press stop/save. The recording, complete with relevant information would then be automatically saved to the cloud. The patient would then be greyed out from the list and the software ready for the next recording.
THE IMPACT
Since the implementation of the first piece of software, London Vision Clinic have successfully transferred 1000s of recorded surgeries from DVD to the cloud. This has dramatically reduced storage space required, while driving internal efficiencies in locating and viewing previous procedures.
The previous process of retrieving a surgery recording for review was lengthy. It would typically take a number of hours to request, identify and retrieve the relevant DVD and copy the required recording from the disc. The new process means the surgeon can use a terminal within the clinic and quickly locate and watch a previous surgery in minutes without needing to rely on other staff.
Additionally, the resilience and durability of the recordings have been dramatically increased by moving from a physical medium to a digital one. Amazon S3 storage is designed for 99.999999999% durability. In addition, there are also additional layers of contingency for the video files, as well as a further backup of the data within the cloud.
By having an ‘effortless’ user experience in using the new camera capture software it ensures an efficient process for capturing surgical recordings. Video files securely transferred to the cloud and can be retrieved and reviewed by the research and surgical teams almost instantly following a procedure.