Case Study: How Pioneer Technology Redefined Nursing Home IT
Executive Summary
Grace Healthcare, a 45-location long-term post-acute care (LTPAC) organization, aimed to completely redefine what was possible for information technology at nursing home facilities with Pioneer Technology.
In the early 2000s, little focus was placed on IT and how it could improve the business and patient care. Once regulations began to change and the introduction of electronic medical records and electronic medication administration occurred, it became critically important for LTPAC facilities to make significant investments and improvements into their IT infrastructure and strategy. This would allow them to remain competitive and meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
With the help of Pioneer Technology, Grace Healthcare adopted the right technologies, solutions, and strategies so their nurses, CNAs, and administrators could focus on patient care and avoid managing IT issues. In the process, Grace achieved an end-to-end partnership providing a robust, responsive, customer-focused IT model that kept them on track for continued growth.
About Grace Healthcare
“Grace Healthcare is a privately-owned organization that supports skilled nursing, assisted living and rehabilitation facilities across the United States.
It is our goal that you or your loved one will receive quality, compassionate care by well-trained professionals whose goal is serving you from the heart. Our facility care partners provide each resident the opportunity to achieve their greatest potential and endeavor to provide peace of mind to families.
Our company’s philosophy of Graceful Living encourages facility teams to go above and beyond in creating warm, caring environments. This common goal drives us to develop new programs and initiatives that support continuous improvement in care.”
Challenges
Grace Healthcare-supported facilities were experiencing several IT challenges which contributed to an overall negative opinion of IT by administrators and staff.
Times were changing in the field, and regulations and rules such as HIPAA, the ‘HITECH’ Act, and Meaningful Use were getting stricter and required adopting digital technologies to keep up. Not only that, but Grace was growing rapidly.
With the adoption of these technologies came a dramatic increase in the number of required devices, including more PCs, laptops, and even mobile carts for point of care, to name a few. This created more security considerations, potential for bandwidth and infrastructure strain, and more demanding technology.
Grace needed solutions to maintain security and meet regulations, manage the influx of devices needed to run a facility, and improve the efficiency, automation, and performance of the data center while simplifying the infrastructure required to run the business. All of this needed to be done while creating a cohesive information technology process that was standardized and consistent for all 45 locations.
How We Helped
Pioneer Technology follows a mantra we call the Hub + Spoke IT Methodology™. Essentially, it means we ensure all services, technologies, software, and hardware represent the best possible fit so that your organization’s “IT wheel” can keep rolling along smoothly.
We took a consultative, long-term approach with Grace Healthcare and studied their specific needs for better device performance, highly stable and efficient infrastructure, an improved service desk experience, and more.
Once we had a complete understanding of the entire IT environment for Grace, Pioneer Technology:
Instituted proactive end-point device and hardware management and support
Removed the chance of a single point of failure for all infrastructure-related areas – if a system went down it would not impact the whole enterprise, including mission-critical applications
Created an intranet to simplify the end user experience
Increased adoption of cloud services and technologies to reduce cost and improve performance at the enterprise level
Drastically improved service desk interactions to include focus on first call resolutions (FCR) and significantly decreased hold and wait times
Results
Because of this managed services relationship, the effectiveness of the services from the relationship between Pioneer Technology and Grace Healthcare-supported facilities has resulted in a positive opinion of IT support and has eliminated the stresses associated with resolving IT issues.
In addition to these points, Grace Healthcare achieved the following:
Significant reduction in the number of servers (because of the move away from remote desktop) – reducing cost and increasing efficiency
Introduction of native desktop support while increasing use of SaaS (cloud) model to support remote work and multiple locations
Greatly improved overall IT efforts and outcomes for application hosting, systems engineering, network engineering, and service desk support
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“One of the best strategic decisions we have made is moving over to Pioneer Technology. They were, and are, instrumental in supporting GHC and our supported facilities by creating a technology plan and providing exceptional IT services and support.”
- Cyndi Matheny, President
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