British Heart Foundation

The Customer 

For over 63 years, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) has been at the forefront of research into heart and circulatory disease, powering life-saving advancements in the field. Right now, 7.6 million people in the UK are living with heart and circulatory diseases, and BHF is constantly looking for new ways to prevent and treat these conditions to give people more time with the ones they love. 

At the heart of this work is The Circuit, the national defibrillator network and one of the world’s most advanced defibrillator databases, developed by BHF in partnership with Resuscitation Council UK, St John Ambulance and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives. Built on Microsoft Azure, it provides dynamic updates every 60 seconds, ensuring that all 14 UK ambulance services have the latest information on registered defibrillators. Each year there are more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK, yet fewer than one in ten people survive. Quick access to a defibrillator can more than double the chances of survival, but too often these devices go unused simply because emergency services do not know where they are. 

Right from the start, we recognised in Hitachi Solutions a potential partner that would listen to us and really recognise the value of what we were trying to achieve, the lifesaving benefits of what we were trying to build and support.

The Challenge

In 2023, Hitachi Solutions’ Support Services team was awarded the contract to support The Circuit, ensuring its seamless integration into the support framework. Given the platform’s critical role in ambulance operations, maintaining continuous availability throughout the handover was essential, so the team collaborated closely with BHF and its existing partner to deliver a smooth, disruption-free transition. 

As part of onboarding, the solution assessment team conducted a comprehensive review of the platform’s architecture. This detailed evaluation provided a clear blueprint of The Circuit and uncovered several opportunities for enhancement. Upgrading the platform’s .NET framework was prioritised to improve performance and help future-proof the system. The team also identified a number of user experience improvements to make the platform more intuitive and accessible, and made strengthening the system’s monitoring and analytics a key focus, giving BHF dynamic, real-time insights to maximise the platform’s impact. 

The Solution

To ensure a smooth transition, the team began by delivering dedicated application support, giving BHF the time it needed to review and prioritise its backlog before new development began. Within just four months, the joint team resolved issues, implemented key security enhancements and introduced an agile, sprint-based development approach to drive continuous improvement. 

Building on that success, the teams launched a major upgrade project, transitioning The Circuit to the latest .NET Core version. Monitoring was improved through advanced telemetry and real-time tracking tools, allowing proactive issue detection so that potential disruptions are resolved before they affect ambulance services. Scalability was another critical focus: by harnessing Microsoft Azure, the team configured dynamic, elastic cloud resources that automatically adapt to changing demand, keeping The Circuit responsive, cost-effective and ready to support BHF’s growing needs. 

By early December 2024, following the successful upgrade, the new enhanced version of The Circuit went live. Within days, BHF reached a significant milestone, registering 100,000 defibrillators on the platform and underlining its vital role in improving emergency response. 

There has been a huge amount of time and effort spent by everyone in the team. The results truly speak for themselves, and I really hope everyone is incredibly proud of their contributions to such an important programme, helping to save lives.

Why Hitachi Solutions

BHF needed more than a technical supplier. It needed a partner that would understand its life-saving mission and provide the right infrastructure to support it for the long term. Hitachi Solutions combined deep technical expertise with a hands-on, personalised approach, drawing on multidisciplinary teams across user-centred design, Lifetime Services, project management and testing, and a flexible project management style suited to the dynamic needs of a charity. 

We were very lucky to have a technology partner like Hitachi Solutions to help us identify how The Circuit itself needs to evolve as the technology around The Circuit would evolve.

The Benefits 

• A strategic, trusted partnership with a partner that genuinely cares about the mission 
• Enhanced visibility and insight into The Circuit, enabling more informed decision-making 
• An improved registration process, increasing accessibility for guardians registering devices 
• Comprehensive, multidisciplinary support across design, delivery, project management and testing 
• Flexible project management that adapts to BHF’s dynamic organisational needs 
• Successful registration of 100,000 defibrillators, contributing to BHF’s broader life-saving efforts 

What’s Next? 

At the centre of the ongoing partnership is a shared commitment to saving lives. As The Circuit goes from strength to strength, the focus remains on identifying opportunities to register and deploy even more defibrillators, ensuring they are readily available when needed most. Innovative challenges, such as how to get a defibrillator to someone who is already giving CPR to a patient, offer a unique opportunity to push the boundaries of technology and create solutions that make a real difference. Looking ahead, BHF and Hitachi Solutions will continue to explore new ways to advance the platform.