Pure Physiotherapy
The customer
Pure Physiotherapy assesses, diagnoses and treats musculoskeletal conditions. It works closely with the NHS, providing First Contact Practitioner physiotherapy services to over thirty Primary Care Networks. This has rapidly become a big part of its business.
In addition to its NHS work, Pure Physiotherapy supports patients referred by private GPs, medical consultants, patients themselves and major insurers such as BUPA, Nuffield, AXA and Aviva.
The company has grown rapidly, doubling in size as a result of its NHS contracts. It now has over 100 employees.
The challenge
- Provide staff with secure remote access to the medical records of NHS patients they have been asked to assess or treat. This access had to be from anywhere, including GP surgeries, clinics and employee homes.
- Provide the firm’s Headquarters with HSCN access.
- Provide more bandwidth for video conferencing and general Internet use at the firm’s HQ.
- End dependence on Primary Care Networks sharing laptops, tokens and physical access to their networks.
Pure Physiotherapy was dependent on local practices to provide Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) access in each area in which it operated. This bottleneck slowed down the onboarding of customers and creating work for those customers’ IT teams.
Pure Physiotherapy discovered that accessing HSCN didn’t have to be this fiddly. They could get their own independent HSCN connection, eliminating that dependence, making life easier for them, their clients and their staff.
The solution
- Tokenless remote access to NHS England’s Health and Social Care Network via a Fortinet-based SSL VPN
- 200 Mbps leased line for head office
- Dedicated HSCN connection, accessed via a VPN, running on the firm’s own laptops.
Syntura provides Pure Physiotherapy with its own independent connection to HSCN. Primary Care Networks (PCNs) no longer needed to supply laptops or access tokens. Pure Physiotherapy is able to use their HSCN connection to update patient records stored using EMIS and SystmOne.
The solution is scalable, allowing Pure Physiotherapy to upgrade their HSCN connection as and when needed.
Why Syntura?
A combination of reasons:
- Simplicity: The HSCN remote-access solution did not require tokens.
- Range of Services: Pure Physiotherapy wanted a supplier that could supply both HSCN remote access and fast dedicated connectivity to the HQ of Pure Physio and its related companies.
- Good Value: As an NHS supplier bidding for contracts, Pure Physiotherapy needed to get good value from its own suppliers, to keep its costs in check.
Typically you would have one laptop provided for a contract, and if we needed someone to cover that, we would have to arrange a way of transferring that laptop to carry out the clinic. Until we had our own VPNs, we weren’t able to share that around and cross-cover things quite as easily.
Tom Beadle NHS Services Lead, Pure Physiotherapy
Benefits
Syntura’s solution has offered significant benefits:
- More Attractive Proposition to NHS Clients – NHS clients would no longer have to supply Pure Physiotherapy with any IT hardware or physical network access in order for Pure Physiotherapy to update patient records. This option proved extremely popular, with all clients offered this option taking it.
- Faster Client Onboarding – Pure Physiotherapy was no longer dependent on clients to supply it with laptops, VPN credentials or tokens. By having its own HSCN connection already in place, Pure Physiotherapy was able to grow at a faster pace, and not worry about PCN’s limited funding for laptops or client delays in buying/configuring/distributing such tools.
- Working from Anywhere – Staff could read & update patient records from anywhere, including from home, which was especially helpful during the COVID lockdowns.
- Consistent Processes – Accessing patient records is easier now there’s a single, nationally-available away to access HSCN, replacing many of the 30+ PCN-specific ones that otherwise would have been required, complicating staff induction and training.
- Easier Cross-Cover – Staff could cover shifts across PCN boundaries, updating patient records, without needing to pass on laptops or tokens to the person providing the cover.
- Video Conferencing Possible – Fast, dedicated internet access supported the company’s use of Microsoft Teams video conferencing, audio conferencing and SharePoint.
Our offering is now quite strong because we can say we have this independent access to the HSCN… Having the VPN itself means that we can set up the access much, much quicker without the need for the practice input or practice hardware.
Tom Beadle, NHS Services Lead, Pure Physiotherapy
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