Bromley Healthcare

About Bromley Healthcare

Bromley Healthcare is a community healthcare provider in South-east London, offering communities across Bromley, Bexley, Greenwich, and Lewisham with a range of world-class services, clinics, and health programmes, while empowering clinicians to deliver the very highest standard of care.

The Challenge

To optimise the availability of its services, enabling clinicians to engage with their patients through an evolving range of channels, Bromley Healthcare has continued to invest in its own network, spanning all its sites across South-east London. However, with its existing infrastructure beginning to show its age and a significant proportion of reported IT issues directly related to network performance, it became clear a new digital foundation was required.

The decision was therefore made to seek out a new strategic partner who would be able to support a full-scale modernisation project, redesigning the entire network from the ground up. Key priorities including the deployment of pervasive wireless connectivity at all sites, for both corporate and guest devices, and optimal resilience, with minimal points of failure.

Far more than just deploying the required connections, this new partnership would involve working closely with Bromley Healthcare's own network team to take full advantage of the latest advances in networking technology, both now and in the long term - to ensure these solutions could be intelligently deployed to support the highest standards of patient care. This would include providing hands-on support to staff and clinicians, ensuring they would be able to make full use of the new infrastructure's capabilities.

Having already engaged with their teams for a number of tactical services over the years, Bromley Healthcare invited Exponential-e to take part in a highly competitive tender process, where candidates were asked to showcase how they would approach solving Bromley Healthcare's unique goals for its network. Keeping an open mind about the proposed solutions, Bromley Healthcare eventually selected Exponential-e as their new strategic partner, based on the overall strength of their offering and willingness to deliver a truly bespoke, full integrated solution.

The Solution 

Working closely with Bromley Healthcare's own IT team, Exponential-e designed and deployed a full-stack Cisco Meraki ecosystem, incorporating SD-WAN, LAN, and Meraki wireless, combined with scalable firewalls, HSCN connectivity, and hosting in world-class data centres - all managed through a single pane of glass.

A key development for Bromley Healthcare's own networking team has been the implementation of application-level monitoring, allowing for full control and visibility of the entire network. This has enabled faster, more effective troubleshooting, ensuring key applications are always available to clinicians, whenever and wherever they are required. At the same time, a dedicated team at Exponential-e continues to maintain the underlying digital foundation, ensuring the network will always deliver the highest standards of performance and guarantee the integrity of critical data.

This blend of centralised control and visibility, expert support, and a fully integrated solution wrap meant that time spent on routine network management was reduced by around 75%, saving an average of 35 internal man hours per week. As a result, Bromley Healthcare's own teams have been able to refocus their attention and prioritise resources to broaden the quality, range, and availability of healthcare services across South-east London.

With the new infrastructure firmly established, Bromley Healthcare are now planning the deployment of a next-gen VPN solution, providing staff and clinicians with additional layers of flexibility in the way they work. Plans are also in place to utilise the system's inherent flexibility to make interpreting services available to clinicians via a range of channels, reducing the need for an interpreter to be physically present when required. 

Solution benefits

• A full Meraki technology stack, with centralised control and visibility and the ability to connect to the HSCN
• Resilient, highly secure connectivity for multiple sites across South-east London, enhancing the performance and availability of the platforms clinicians depend on
• A fully managed service, delivering a robust foundation that frees internal teams to focus on clinician and patients' requirements An average of 35 hours per week saved on routine network management, allowing this time to be reinvested in patient care

You have to have a good network; everything else is built on it. So, it was really important to us to develop a real strategic partnership - not just supplying the lines, but providing suggestions, solutions, and best practice to drive something new and open up opportunities to make our clinicians more efficient and effective.

Patrick Montgomery
Chief Technology Officer, Bromley Healthcare

What I liked, and still like - most about working with the team at Exponential-e was that it was a genuinely two-way conversation. At the outset of this project, we were open to anything, and, put simply, their proposal was the best fit for our networking goals.

Patrick Montgomery
Chief Technology Officer, Bromley Healthcare

It's time for the public sector to have its own digital-revolution