July 12th 2023
Bristol Care Homes Drive Digital Transformation Across Care Group with Lily
At Lily, we are dedicated to helping care facilities on their journey to digital transformation. Many care home branches struggle with siloed IT systems, poor broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity. Bristol Care Homes knew this all too well.
In 2021, Lily started to work with Bristol Care Homes in improving their telecommunication and IT infrastructure across four facilities. Now nearly two years on, we continue to progress our strong working relationship and help support them as their trusted IT provider.
Who is Bristol Care Homes?
Bristol Care Homes provide four high-quality care homes in rural and community settings throughout North Bristol and South Gloucestershire. Each care home has over 40 rooms and offers excellent facilities to help its residents live full and happy lives.
Bristol Care Homes have a strong, passionate team of care and operational staff committed to providing the highest quality holistic care at the best value for money.
The IT Challenges
Bristol Care Homes recognised the benefits of improved IT and created a new post in the organisation to deliver and maintain a new care planning system and a new personnel and screening management system. To deliver this, the existing infrastructure and hardware had to be greatly improved.
Whilst Bristol Care Homes had a clear requirement, their existing IT supplier lacked the experience and expertise needed to deliver the solution.
A significant driver of IT standards in Care Homes is the requirement for NHS.net email accounts for referrals and confidential communications. This meant that a much more standardised and secure model was required. Lily worked closely with Bristol Care Homes to meet these standards across hardware and software, and the group is now recognised as a leader in digitisation.
Management reporting was also very important to Bristol Care Homes. Lily worked hard to understand the system configuration required to enable the free flow of information from different sources without compromising security.
By Lily enabling a single system environment, Bristol Care Homes were able to centralise many of their back-office functions, freeing up significant resources that could then be redirected to resident care during the COVID period.
Bristol Care Homes wanted an experienced partner that could help transform their system, reduce costs and provide outstanding customer service. Lily was their answer.
How Lily Helped Bristol Care Homes
The Lily team worked closely with Bristol Care Homes to understand their challenges, requirements and desired outcomes. From there, a strategic plan was put in place.
Bristol Care Homes have over 200 resident rooms, all of which come equipped with a personal phone as well as separate phone systems located in the office. To meet the needs of the team and residents, we implemented a hybrid phone system which blends both on-premise and cloud-based system features together.
In the office, the staff has access to the Ericsson-LG phone system, which is accessible on smartphones, tablets and laptops remotely or on the floor. With greater flexibility, the Bristol Care Home group uses a centralised system to improve internal communication.
Digital transformation was a key driver behind their needs, so by using Lily Shield, Bristol Care Homes were in safe hands. Lily Shield is an advanced IT protection solution which includes a variety of features such as IT support, anti-spam, web protection and document backup. As part of this service, our dedicated team helped Bristol Care Homes move to the cloud and has implemented Microsoft 365 to improve productivity and collaboration.
We also installed super-fast broadband throughout the care homes to ensure the smooth running of their IT and hosted phone systems. Bristol Care Homes quickly waved goodbye to outdated systems and welcomed a modern, digital approach to work.
The Results
Since the beginning, Bristol Care Homes’ digital transformation journey has been seamless with Lily. They admired our fast implementation and ongoing support and are happy to see their systems able to adapt to new challenges and change far more rapidly than before.
Lily continues to manage Bristol Care Homes’ IT system and is working on becoming less hardware dependent and future proofing against an increasing reporting and compliance environment.
In the future, Bristol Care Homes plan to complete a Cyber Essentials certification to demonstrate they can meet likely new requirements of the CCGs and NHS. As trusted cyber advisors, we will help Bristol Care Homes eliminate cyber threats and meet compliance with Cyber Essentials.
If you want to know more about how we can help your care facility, contact our team today.