East Berkshire Primary Care (EBPC )

The client

East Berkshire Primary Care (EBPC) is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in Bracknell, Berkshire, delivering NHS Urgent and Primary Care services across East Berkshire and nearby areas.  

Established in 2004, EBPC focuses on improving access to healthcare offering services such as GP out of hours, remote monitoring, extended access for PCNs, a GP practice, dental triage, and outreach for vulnerable groups. With around 300 employees over 15 different services, EBPC’s commitment to patient-centred care and innovation helps to reduce pressure on NHS services. 

The challenge

Arc have worked with East Berkshire Out of Hours since 2012. We originally came onboard to help support the internal IT requirement and the aging locally hosted Adastra instance. Our first project involved mapping out all of the resources and understanding the out-of-hours requirements for the services. Within a 4-week period, we were helping support the existing infrastructure and all of the staff and remote GPs.  

The second project was to help migrate the existing system over to updated resilient equipment. Utilising HP server stack that our team built out within a tier 4 datacentre, a scope was provided to improve the performance and resilience for the expanding service. Working in conjunction with Adastra, we were able to seamlessly switch across from the older hardware minimising downtime. This phase was completed in early 2015 and helped the organisation to grow and support the resilience required. 

With stable support for many years on the hardware platform in 2020-2021, we started to work with EBPC to look at another hardware refresh. 

The solution

With the expertise within Arc cloud services utilising Microsoft Azure had become a relevant option for comparison. The blockers were that Adastra had never actually been moved to a hosted cloud instance outside of the Adastra hosted platform. The only previous option for self-host was the hardware option, which EBPC were already running. Rather than stick and hold with a legacy idea, through various testing and consultancy, we put forward a proposal to move the infrastructure to Microsoft Azure; this included a fully tested failover plan as well as user acceptance testing, should there be an issue.  

Working with Adastra, we successfully migrated EBPC into Microsoft Azure running a fully resilient cloud self-hosted solution. This also included a full cloud based HSCN connection directly into Azure utilising the Single Sign On Capabilities within Microsoft 365\Azure. 

The results

We continue to be the trusted resource for EBPC and many other trusts and practices, helping empower these organisations whilst helping reduce costs.  

In August 2022, there was a major hack and outage over many weeks to the Adastra platform. Through all of this outage, EBPC remained completely online and helped with other services to keep them online utilising their infrastructure.  

We also have an expert view on all of the applications and services and bring a new spin to the support offering within the NHS. 

Matt Widdows, Chief Operating Officer at EBPC, said: “Our partnership with Arc has been built on trust, collaboration, and a shared commitment to deliver for our staff and patients. Their flexibility and ability to deliver at pace has been exceptional, they’ve consistently adapted to our evolving needs and worked alongside us as a true partner and integrating members of the Arc team into our daily operations. The strength of our relationship has enabled us to innovate confidently, knowing we have a partner who understands our operational pressures and can move quickly to deliver robust, resilient solutions.”

The results for our project with EBPC included: 

• No further hardware support 
• Removal of expensive datacentres 
• Removal of expensive leased line connections 
• Removal of HSCN local connections  
• The ability to instantly scale up and down resources based on requirements 
• Access to their own data to provide real-time reports and information  
• Resilience with decreased RTO & RPO 
• Integration with secure Microsoft service such as Purview, DLP, Entra 

EBPC are now also able to manage and report on their data in near real time. We’ve built the infrastructure and data layer inside of EBPC’s Azure tenant to enable their BI teams to report and measure real-time data. There are no limitations or costs based on API connections; they can instantly transform information from the database into easily readable formats showing a concise picture of what is happening within their service, building dashboards which you can see examples of below: