Introduction
Badger Group (Birmingham and District General Practitioner Emergency Room) is a not-for-profit healthcare co-operative providing GP Out-of-Hours and Urgent Treatment Services (UTCs) to over 1.3 million people across Birmingham and Solihull.
With a long history of innovation in urgent care, from developing phone consulting to pioneering drive-through services and a virtual waiting room, Badger continues to put people before profits. Working in partnership with the NHS and other healthcare organisations, its mission is to deliver consistent, high-quality care to patients when they need it most.
To achieve this, Badger relies on IT systems that are secure, reliable, and trusted by staff who cannot afford downtime or disruption during critical clinical services. ROCK was engaged to provide a fully managed IT service that could support both day-to-day operations and long-term growth.
The Challenge
For Badger, IT is more than just infrastructure, it underpins every aspect of patient care. Staff need systems they can trust during high-pressure situations, where delays or downtime can directly impact patient care and outcomes. Key challenges included:
- Badger needed an IT partner capable of delivering resilience, governance, and responsive support across its growing network of sites.
- Reliability was an issue as service interruptions and downtime disrupted urgent clinical workflows.
- Distributed sites with varying connectivity made consistent IT delivery difficult.
- Cost unpredictability arose from reliance on ad-hoc IT fixes that led to budget overspend and instability.
- User experience suffered as clinical staff were frustrated by unreliable systems and slow helpdesk responses.
Badger needed an IT partner capable of delivering resilience, governance, and responsive support across its growing network of sites.
The Solution
To address these challenges, ROCK delivered a comprehensive end-to-end managed IT service. This was designed around Badger’s clinical priorities and compliance requirements, with a clear roadmap of enhancements post-delivery of proactive services. This ensured resilience, security, and responsive support across their distributed sites.
- Infrastructure reliability: Core systems stabilised with dependable uptime and tested disaster recovery replacing ad-hoc backups.
- Cloud optimisation: Migration to hybrid environment with Microsoft Azure delivering resilience, scalability and secure remote access.
- Proactive monitoring: RMM tools deployed for continuous monitoring, automated patching and faster incident response.
- 24/7/365 helpdesk: Around the clock SLA-driven support with clear escalation paths, ensuring issues are resolved quickly even during out-of-hours service delivery.
- Security programme: MFA, encryption, role-based access controls and regular audits strengthening compliance.
- Strategic alignment: Quarterly reviews and reporting ensuring IT remains aligned with clinical priorities.
The Benefit
The partnership has delivered measurable improvements across every area of IT, directly supporting Badger.
- System uptime: 90% reduction in downtime.
- Helpdesk: Faster response and resolution boosting productivity.
- Security & compliance: Regular patching and access controls reducing risk.
- Scalability: New UTCs and services integrated quickly driving business growth.
- Cost predictability: Fixed fees replacing unpredictable IT spend.
- Staff experience: Reliable systems and support boost confidence.
Proof In Numbers
97% SLA success rate
90% Reduced downtime
15 minutes IT support response time.
100% IT support ticket resolution.
Why work with ROCK
Badger chose ROCK as a long-term IT partner because of our proven track record in healthcare and deep understanding of NHS compliance requirements. For an organisation where reliability and security directly affect patient care, having confidence in IT systems was non-negotiable.
ROCK provided that assurance through SLA-driven service help desk available 24/7/365, proactive monitoring and automation to prevent issues before they caused disruption, and resilient solutions designed to scale with the organisation as new UTCs were added.
Equally important was the governance and collaboration we built into the partnership. Regular reviews ensured IT strategy stayed aligned with Badger’s clinical priorities, while our focus on long-term stability gave their teams the confidence to concentrate on patient outcomes instead of IT concerns.
“Outsourcing IT has given us confidence in reliability, compliance, and support. We can focus on delivering urgent care without worrying about downtime or IT issues.”
- Head of IT & Digital, Badger Group
