Project Overview
Situation
Following a digital convergence, Isle of Wight and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trusts needed consistent, reliable estate visibility to support governance, cyber assurance, and operational planning across the newly formed joint digital service, ensuring both teams could work from a shared, trusted view.
Solution
By extending the ITHealth Dashboard, already in use at the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, and engaging ITHealth Professional Services, the Trusts established a single, trusted view of their combined estate, enabling informed decision-making, targeted remediation, and more effective joint estate management.
Isle of Wight NHS Trust and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust operate under a group model, retaining separate legal identities while collaborating through a single corporate and digital service. Together, the digital team manages thousands of endpoints, servers, and applications across multiple sites and is working to implement shared tools, processes, and governance to support patient care, security, and operational resilience. By partnering with ITHealth, the Trusts are enhancing visibility, strengthening risk management, and improving assurance across the joint digital estate.
The Situation
In November 2024, the Corporate and Digital Services teams of Isle of Wight NHS Trust and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust converged to form a single, joint digital service. While Isle of Wight NHS Trust had already established strong foundations around estate visibility, asset management, and cyber reporting with the ITHealth Dashboard, Portsmouth Hospitals University was at an earlier stage in its device management and cyber maturity journey and had limited insight into endpoints, servers, and patching status.
This disparity presented an immediate challenge. Operating as one digital service required shared insight, consistent data, and a common understanding of risk and compliance across both estates. Without that, planning large-scale initiatives – such as operating system upgrades, patching programmes, and cyber assurance reporting – would be significantly more complex and less effective.
The joint digital leadership team recognised that success depended on “levelling up” visibility across both Trusts, without disrupting services or introducing unnecessary complexity. They needed a solution that could bring together multiple data sources, support both technical and governance use cases, and scale across a diverse and evolving estate – while still allowing teams to filter, compare, and report appropriately at Trust level.
“As we converged into a single digital service, having a consistent and reliable view of both digital estates became essential. We needed to understand where we were starting from and how we could move forward together.”
Jake Gully
Associate Director of IT
Isle of Wight and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trusts
The Solution
Building on the established deployment already in place at the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, the joint digital team chose to extend the ITHealth Dashboard across the newly converged estate to bring Portsmouth Hospitals University data into the same unified view. This created a single reporting environment capable of ingesting and correlating data from multiple sources, including asset discovery, endpoint security, and vulnerability information.
Working closely with ITHealth Professional Services, the Trusts defined a delivery approach prioritising swift implementation, reliable data capture, and practical integration of Portsmouth Hospitals University data feeds – including Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE), medical device discovery (via Axonius, formerly Cynerio), and asset discovery – ensuring previously unseen endpoints and assets were visible in the unified ITHealth Dashboard. For Portsmouth Hospitals University this involved deploying additional collectors, expanding scanning coverage, and introducing agent-based discovery for mobile or remote endpoints, while Isle of Wight NHS Trust’s environment continued to operate from its established configuration.
ITHealth Professional Services guided implementation decisions, configured dashboards, and supported filtering and reporting so that teams could view the estate collectively or by Trust, depending on their role. This collaborative approach ensured the ITHealth Dashboard delivered real operational value, rather than being a purely technical deployment.
As a result, the converged digital team gained a shared, trusted foundation for managing risk, prioritising remediation, and planning future investment across both organisations.
“Our aim was simple: to achieve the same level of visibility across both Trusts, so everyone was working from the same, trusted set of information.”
Michael Owers
Enterprise Architect Engineer
Isle of Wight and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trusts
Results and Next Steps
With the ITHealth Dashboard fully embedded across both Trusts, the joint digital team now operates with a consistent view of endpoints, servers, and associated risks. Queries about Portsmouth Hospitals University’s estate can now be answered as readily as they can for the Isle of Wight, improving responsiveness and operational oversight. This visibility has already enabled more targeted programmes, including operating system migrations (e.g. Windows 10 to 11), improved vulnerability management, and accurate reporting to governance and assurance forums.
The ITHealth Dashboard has also supported strategic planning, helping teams understand the true shape of the estate, identify legacy technologies, and make informed decisions around lifecycle replacement and investment. Importantly, it has created a shared language and evidence base for conversations between technical teams, cyber specialists, and senior stakeholders.
Next steps focus on widening adoption across the digital service, particularly within frontline service desk teams, and utilising the ITHealth Dashboard’s CAF-DSPT workflow module for information governance teams. Through further training and engagement, the ITHealth Dashboard is becoming a core operational and assurance tool, supporting audits, compliance submissions, and continuous improvement as the group digital model matures.
“We now have a full picture of the joint digital estate, empowering us to manage migrations, patches, and vulnerabilities more effectively. The ITHealth Dashboard is central to our risk management and assurance processes.”
Jake Gully
Associate Director of IT
Isle of Wight and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trusts
