TIDMADT
AdEPT Technology Group PLC
21 April 2020
AdEPT Technology Group PLC
("AdEPT" or the "Company")
Helping the NHS at a time of need - a good news story in
challenging times
21(st) April 2020
The team at AdEPT Technology deliver solutions that impact more
than 2.1m patients, thousands of health sector staff, hundreds of
GP practices and many care homes nationwide.
All of which have had to rapidly adapt to the changing world
caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Relevance for investors
Striking the right balance between public and private sector
clients has always been important to AdEPT, with our turnover being
roughly 45 per cent public sector - across the NHS, education and
government - and 55 per cent commercial, of which there are
thousands of customers.
This balance gives AdEPT access to multiple types of client,
creating a resilience as one sector waxes, whilst the other wanes.
This dynamic has never been more important than at this extreme
time for the UK economy.
AdEPT operating in the health arena
AdEPT has a long-standing presence within the Health Sector.
Over recent years the AdEPT presence in Health has accelerated as,
working with our partner, Convergence Group, we have deployed a
secure and performant digital network across Kent, as part of the
UK wide Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) deployment.
These AdEPT provisioned data networks are supporting over 30 NHS
Trusts and and many large private hospitals such as Great Ormond
Street (GOSH).
These challenging times have led to the NHS and the private
sector working ever more closely - for example AdEPT customer, HCA,
the Health Corporation of America operate approximately 70% of the
private hospitals in London,, is now providing extensive services,
beds and expertise to the NHS to relieve the pressure on existing
NHS facilities.
Whilst the challenge of remote working and increases in patient
numbers has also brought about massive changes to the front-line
staff in Doctor's surgeries. Aworld well known to AdEPT given it
services over 400 Doctor's surgeries across the UK, who, in turn
look after over 500,000 patients.
Instant changes
A new word for challenging times - unprecedented. These are
indeed unprecedented times. Daily podium appearances by the
Cabinet, charts and graphs depicting infection rates and deaths,
instructions to stay home and Government advertisements imploring
people to socially distance.
We are learning new phrases like 'furlough', lockdown', 'social
distancing' and 'key worker' - with AdEPT employees classified as
key workers to help keep the UK moving. It's clear that Information
Technology, telephony and networking have never been more critical
to the functioning of the UK. It's no wonder that services AdEPT
provide are being called the '4(th) utility'.
Rising to the challenge
Immediately AdEPT saw a massive rise in requests for help, with
AdEPT service desks experiencing in some cases a 10-fold increase
in support calls, with many originating from Primary Care and
Doctors surgeries - in a three week period AdEPT fielded over 1500
support requests from NHS sites.
The calls varied - some surgeries requested help to update
messages to inform the public on the best medical advicea lot of
further changes. These became frequent as the advice constantly
changed. In a gesture, just like many other businesses, AdEPT
provided this service to the NHS free of charge.
Working practices changed overnight. Many surgeries now decided
to triage every request for an appointment. This increases the
burden on the front-line teams and their communication facilities -
but with the benefit of a reduced burden on the doctors
themselves.
Addressing this surge in demand would sometimes be achieved
remotely with a simple remote change, but with older systems a
visit to the practice was required. Again, AdEPT chose to provide
our engineering resources at no cost to deliver this service.
Sales Director, Tracy Jackson, based at AdEPT's Doncaster
office, deals with many of these GP surgeries. Tracy commented "our
engineers feel proud to do what they can to support the NHS, and
many are working additional hours to complete this work without any
financial recognition."
The Virtual Surgery
The world we live in has changed significantly over the past few
weeks and the way Doctors provide primary care has also changed. We
are conditioned to expect all primary care needs to be supplied at
a central location - the Surgery.
With long standing roles; receptionists taking the calls and
booking appointments, doctors and nurses sitting in consulting
rooms, with waiting rooms full of patients waiting to see the
clinicians.
Surgeries, and their technology partners, have suddenly been
challenged to find solutions that will support administration teams
and receptionists working from home. With a substantial increase
the volume of incoming calls and a sudden change to the process -
with triage on all calls.
Analogue in a Digital World
The infrastructure of many Doctor's surgeries is typically set
up onsite with no, or very little, remote working requirement. The
idea of a virtual surgery just wasn't a design goal.
This challenge is slowly being addressed, with better bandwidth
and a better understanding of how to build security and remotely
accessible solutions.
Some exemplars leading the way
Care Plus Group are providers of community health and care
services in the North East Lincs region. Care Plus are an example
of the art of the possible, having fully embraced the convergence
of voice and data. Within the Care Plus technical architecture the
voice solution is a fully embedded application supported by their
IT team with back up from AdEPT.
Immediately after the government announcement of lock-down the
AdEPT team had a call from Care Plus asking - "how can we support
this new world of remote working?" Their mission, to ensure care
services would be maintained during the Covid-19 outbreak.
Fortunately, as leaders not laggards, their converged network
made the solution simple. Their telephony architecture - Avaya IP
Office Server Edition - supported the softphone solution for both
administrators and contact centre staff. AdEPT simply applied the
correct license and they were up and running within 24 hours.
Sadly, not so easy for some
This was not as simple for surgeries without converged networks
and with poor bandwidth. For these AdEPT had to find a solution
that;
a) Did not require any Clinical Commissioning Group IT expertise
- as these teams were stretched due to the crisis, and
b) Did not put any further demands on the limited bandwidth
available in the NHS N3/HSCN networks.
Rising to the challenge
To solve this problem AdEPT combined the strong call routing
capabilities of the telephone system held on-site at the surgery
and the flexibility of the AdEPT Nebula Cloud Hosted voice
platform. In essence, AdEPT routed the on-premise solution to the
cloud hosted solution - to provide the virtual surgery
capability.
The solution enabled administration and reception staff to work
from home, fielding high volumes of calls due to the increased
demands on primary care.
It delivered calls straight to their mobiles, with the calls
still fully recorded and secure, whilst maintaining the high
service levels their patients expect. For example, explaining to
patients where they were in a queue and routing calls to the right
Doctor's teams.
The solution provided Doctors with the ability to make calls
from their mobiles while at home. Calls that are secure, fully
recorded and appear to be coming from the surgery.
Neither the 'diverted on-premise' solution nor the 'hosted
cloud' solution required any increased number of lines or expensive
software licenses. They were provided within hours of the request
arriving, are provided on a monthly basis and can be turned off
without penalty when this crisis ends.
Impacting the lives of many
This is a solution that has now been provided to 150 surgeries -
with many more being deployed daily. Surgeries serving thousands of
patients across the region.
"F4 IT (wholly owned subsidiary of Care Plus Group) have worked
with AdEPT for over 15 years and, with their help, we have
implemented a fully converged voice and data network, with
resilience, security and flexibility at the core of the design.
This enabled F4 IT to immediately respond to the demands caused
by the Covid 19 outbreak, mobilising over 75% of our health care
clients inside 24 hours with full data and voice access.
The AdEPT team responded instantly to the many challenges we
set, caused by the Covid-19 situation. Working with AdEPT, F4 IT
and its clients were able to seamlessly transition to their
emergency response operation - allowing critical front-line
services to operate with a full complement of voice and data
facilities.
Kind regards, Darren McKay - Director of F4 IT"
Hospitals present a further challenge
As soon as the scale of the pandemic became apparent the data
flowing across hospital networks increased substantially. This data
is crucial to the effective operation of a hospital as well as the
battle to defeat this virus.
NHS calls have been prioritised, whilst critical resources
within AdEPT partners Openreach (a Division of BT) and Virgin Media
Business are focussed on the most critical project activities.
Proactive upgrades
During this time AdEPT, working with partner Convergence Group,
have completed a number of network upgrades Free Of Charge for Kent
NHS locations. These locations were targeted as, firstly, network
monitoring revealed that they had high bandwidth utilisation,
running close to the maximum capacity - and, secondly, there was an
available option to upgrade the bandwidth to support the Health
Trust.
This pro-active upgrade initiative has already benefited four
sites in Kent - providing additional bandwidth to the sites to
ensure their computer networks are not struggling under the
additional strain.
AdEPT has also been working with partner, AIMES, easing pressure
and providing network capability to various health locations across
the UK in response to the pandemic.
NHS Digital have been playing their part. Co-ordinating
expertise from all HSCN suppliers - chairing a weekly working group
session to review issues and identify solutions. This involves a
vast cross section of individuals across all size of supplier
assisting NHS Digital - all with the aim of addressing the
massively increased demand on services and the Health & Social
Care Network.
[NHS Digital are the national information and technology partner
to the health and social care system. They are using digital
technology to transform the NHS and social care, with a mission to
harness the power of information and technology to improve health
and care.]
New capacity
AdEPT is also fast tracking the deployment of new high-speed
links to carry over 20GB of data into the local hospitals of
Tunbridge Wells and Maidstone. A deployment that again is being
undertaken at a reduced cost in partnership with AdEPT partner
Convergence Group.
Both of these hospitals operate A&E departments and are
hosting Covid-19 pods to deal with the pandemic. This tenfold
increase in connectivity will greatly boost the capacity of their
networks.
Finally, within the social Care arena
The Care Home sector has really hit the headlines in recent
days, as they are a yvulnerable sector within the Covid-19
pandemic. With over 400,000 elderly residents living in nursing and
care home settings, this is a significantly important sector of the
UK economy.
AdEPT supports more than 20 care home providers and none more so
than Rusthall Lodge Care Home, close to AdEPT's Head Office in
Tunbridge Wells. AdEPT were only recently been selected as the Care
Home's IT, Voice and Data partner.
Given the vulnerability of Residents to Covid-19, the Home's
Senior Management Team (SMT) needed to create an on-site/off-site
staffing system that supported the 24x7 care obligations and
nursing of residents, whilst minimising the risk and exposure of
both staff and Residents to the Covid-19 virus.
In response AdEPT delivered a new secure firewall and remote
working service to support and aide the Home's business continuity
plan. A small example of the sort of challenges AdEPT have been
delivering across the health & care arena.
All in all, a positive story arising from times of massive
challenge.
For a full briefing please contact:
AdEPT Technology Group Plc
Phil Race, Chief Executive 07798 575 338
Ben Rogers, Head of Marketing 01689 814 700
Cantor Fitzgerald Europe
Nominated Adviser & Broker 020 7894 7000
Phil Davies/Will Goode
This announcement has been released by Ben Rogers, Head of
Marketing, on behalf of the Company.
About AdEPT Technology Group plc:
AdEPT Technology Group plc is one of the UK's leading
independent providers of managed services for IT, unified
communications, connectivity and voice solutions. AdEPT's tailored
services are used by thousands of customers across the UK and are
brought together through the strategic relationships with tier-1
suppliers such as Openreach, BT Wholesale, Virgin Media, Avaya,
Microsoft, Dell and Apple.
AdEPT is quoted on AIM, operated by the London Stock Exchange
(Ticker: ADT). For further information please visit:
www.adept.co.uk
About Convergence Group:
Working with channel partners Convergence Group supply fully
managed Local Area Networks (LAN), fully managed Wide Area Networks
(WAN) and private internet solutions, that enable businesses to
stay connected, whether its transporting voice or data or accessing
cloud applications, Convergence Group provides secure and reliable
connectivity powering businesses to get on with what's important to
them.
For further information please visit:
www.convergencegroup.co.uk
This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the
London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct
Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United
Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution
of this information may apply. For further information, please
contact rns@lseg.com or visit www.rns.com.
END
NRASEUSUFESSEFL
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