Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust

The Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust Ensures Health of its Email System With Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway.™

Hammersmith's email falls ill to slew of viruses The Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust comprises four different hospitals: Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital, Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital and Ravenscourt Park Hospital. The hospital system is based in northwest London and serves millions of people each year.

Hammersmith is used to being on the cutting edge of curing illness, and is renowned for its specialized services and research, including head trauma treatment, cancer treatment and maternity services. However, Hammersmith recently encountered something it could not cure on its own, namely a slew of dangerous viruses – computer viruses, that is.

“We had a great deal of instability in our email system because of the high volume of viruses that were getting into our organization,” said Mathew Williamson, head of networking and technical support for Hammersmith Hospitals. “Unfortunately, the various anti-virus solutions we implemented over the years could not keep up with constantly evolving virus threats.”

Hammersmith also noticed a large increase in the amount of spam that its employees received, which amounted to thousands of messages each week. A large percentage of the spam was obscene, and Hammersmith felt it had an obligation to protect its employees from such offensive material.

Proofpoint provides spam and virus antidote
After conducting an extensive review of anti-spam and anti-virus solutions, Hammersmith purchased the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, an secure, hardened appliance that uses Proofpoint MLX™ machine learning technology to provide unrivalled effectiveness against inbound spam and viruses.

“What stood out for us about Proofpoint was that the appliance was not only extremely reliable and effective, but it was also incredibly easy to manage,” said Williamson. “We only have a few people on our support team, so ease of use was a critical feature. It was extremely surprising how simple Proofpoint was to install and manage.”

Proofpoint MLX technology accurately eliminates spam by examining more than 100,000 structural and content attributes in every message, automatically adapting to address new threats. As part of its appliance deployment, Hammersmith also uses the Proofpoint Virus Protection™ module, which uses industry-leading anti-virus technology from F-Secure to provide comprehensive defense against all types of viruses, trojans and other forms of malicious code right at the gateway.

Hammersmith needed adaptable anti-spam solution
As a medical institution, many Hammersmith emails contain terms that are acceptable in the medical field, but are often the topic of unsolicited emails, such as pharmaceutical spam. Many anti-spam technologies would automatically block these emails based on the language, but Williamson says the Proofpoint technology is more adept at dealing with these messages.

“We have been able to tweak the offensive language dictionaries to define what we consider acceptable and unacceptable terms,” said Williamson. “Proofpoint has been very successful thus far at distinguishing between acceptable medical language and spam, with negligible false positives.”

In the future, Hammersmith is looking to implement Proofpoint to cleanse its outbound email as well, to prevent sensitive information from being disseminated outside the institution and to comply with future privacy and data protection regulations. Williamson says the UK is moving towards implementing regulations, much like HIPAA in the United States.

“Proofpoint gives us the ability to quickly add on modules to our existing implementation,” said Williamson. “Proofpoint has worked so well at eliminating thousands of unsolicited messages from our incoming stream of email, so we're looking forward to seeing it cleanse our outbound email as well.”

About Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust
Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust is one of over 600 NHS Trusts. The Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust, based in northwest London was formed in April 1994 and is made up of Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital, Queen Charlotte's & Chelsea Hospital and Ravenscourt Park Hospital.

Hammersmith is a busy acute trust with a strong history of education and research. Charing Cross is an undergraduate teaching hospital and Hammersmith is a post graduate teaching hospital, famous for its research achievements Queen Charlotte's is world renowned for its maternity and women's and children's services. Ravenscourt Park Hospital operates as a centre for elective orthopaedic surgery.

Imperial College London has a campus on both main sites and provides close links with all the clinical specialties. The Medical Research Council (MRC) is also based at Hammersmith Hospital providing a strong foundation for clinical and scientific research.