Health Care Practice

Topic: JACK saves the day

Situation
Our client:

  • Has approximately 180 desktops with approximately 12 Virtual Servers
  • Has 6 locations, interconnected with Fiber
  • Has their servers residing in our Co Lo facility

Challenges
the challenges facing the client were:

  • HIPPA compliance requires all of the machines to have the Microsoft Critical updates run on all machines. This is a manual process that is very labor intensive.
    • Even when you set the updates to run automatically, the user has some interaction and they have a tendency to cancel the updates, due to a lack of understanding of what is really happening.
  • Keeping an up to date inventory was tedious and out of date a month after completion.
  • Some PC”s were running very slow or problematic for the employee
    • Not all the PC’s were the same age or level
  • Intermittent bottlenecks on the network slowed down the EMR to unusable levels

Actions
the actions we took to address these challenges were:

  • JACK automatically runs all critical updates as well as regular updates every Wednesday night.
    • No client intervention required
    • JACK provides a report that shows what percentage of the updates are completed and color codes it Green / Yellow / Red to easily see where the problem areas are.
  • JACK started to “heal” the following
    • Hard Drives
    • Registry
    • Operating System
  • JACK put in tickets for the issues he found, that he could not remedy. We then contacted the client with this information to see if they would like us to resolve the issue(s).
  • JACK gathered all of the information, for every connected device and created an up to date inventory that is dynamically updated when items change.

Results
our actions resulted in:

  • A complete and up to date inventory that changes dynamically, with the network
    • Detailed down to the board level
  • Metrics on every PC and Server on the network to help our client plan for the future
  • JACK found that there were multiple PC’s that had imminent failure on the hard drives! We were able to alert the client and get those machines replaced, without any drama or down time.
  • The network ran smoother and there were 30% less tickets after a few months with JACK on the workstations and servers. This translated into a $1500/mo. or $18,000 savings per year.
  • Employees commented that the machines did not have the “circle of death” any longer when trying to do normal or complex items within the EMR software.
  • ALL the critical patches where applied to ALL of the PC’s and servers so the client can remain within the guidelines of HIPPA compliance.