Overview
Millbrook Healthcare deliver community equipment and home adaptations for the NHS and local authorities — beds and mobility aids, stairlifts and grab rails, and the wider Technology Enabled Care services that help people stay independent at home. Elastic Mint embedded one of our team alongside Millbrook’s engineers from May 2025 to February 2026, contributing to the early stages of their platform modernisation programme.
The Challenge
Millbrook’s operations sit on a portfolio of services that has grown over more than three decades. Business logic is spread across multiple legacy applications, integrations are tightly coupled, and event-driven workflows are difficult to evolve. The work in front of them is significant: modernising the platform to a place where new features can ship faster, services can be reasoned about independently, and integrations are built on solid, modern foundations.
Our Approach
We worked as part of the Millbrook team rather than as an external supplier — one of our team embedded with their engineering function and contributed alongside their developers across ten months. That meant taking on real production work, and putting in foundations the next phase of modernisation will build on.
- External integrations: built integrations with third-party route planning and SMS messaging providers, replacing previous ad-hoc approaches with cleaner, testable interfaces.
- Event-driven proof of concept: stood up a POC using Azure Service Bus and MassTransit to demonstrate how event-driven processes can decouple legacy applications and pave the way for service-by-service modernisation.
- Consolidating legacy logic: developed .NET Core APIs that brought together logic previously scattered across legacy applications, giving Millbrook a clearer line on which system owns which behaviour.
- Authentication foundations: integrated Duende Identity Server starting with machine-to-machine flows, so legacy apps and new APIs could communicate securely. A deliberate first step towards using Identity Server to control end-user access in future.
The work was built with the .NET stack Millbrook already invest in — C#, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, SQL Server, Swagger — alongside Azure Service Bus and MassTransit for event-driven workflows, and Duende Identity Server with OAuth 2.0 for authentication.
Outcome
The engagement left Millbrook with concrete building blocks for the next phase of their modernisation: a working pattern for event-driven workflows, consolidated APIs that reduce duplication, and an authentication foundation that future user-facing changes can extend. Just as importantly, it left a clearer picture of what the modernisation programme needs to look like next.
Where we go next
Through ten months working as part of the team, we know Millbrook’s platform inside out — where it stands today and what the next steps in modernisation will need. Elastic Mint is well placed to bring the same hands-on, embedded approach to the wider modernisation work, as a partner, when Millbrook are ready for the next step.
