Business Challenges

The client continued to experience phenomenal growth supporting 14 regional offices and 32 satellite offices across multiple states. The CFO found himself inundated with technical matters that outstripped his IT knowledge to solve or to plan for. He found himself in a position where personnel costs were skyrocketing while overall performance was deteriorating along with user satisfaction. If unchecked, this would negatively affect their ability to attract additional physicians to this expanding practice, one of the largest in the country.

Business challenges included:

• Changing skill requirements for the existing IT staff given the implementation and support requirements of its mission critical software applications, operating systems and user base.
• Lack of standards governing the client's extensive desktop configurations resulting in numerous manufacturers, models and operating systems.
• Non-existent management structure or accountability for a rapidly growing and complex IT Department.
• Run away overtime costs from the IT Department in the course of performing its daily job responsibilities.
• Poor end-user relations between IT and internal staff as well as its satellite offices.
• A degrading and costly mission critical, high speed network with lack of growth potential and the inability to provide system resiliency.
• Lack of attention to HIPAA mandated issues.
• Performance of a risk assessment of the physical site along with development of mitigation strategies for identified areas of concern.

IBS was selected to take on this important and visible role due to our healthcare industry knowledge, our ability to affect change in a positive and professional manner, our ability to communicate and present to Finance Committees, Boards of Directors and Senior Members of Management and our ability to rapidly demonstrate understanding of enterprises business and technology challenges and ability to formulate practical and relevant solutions.

Services Provided by IBS

IBS provided a senior level professional with Technology and Management expertise based on a career of hands-on responsibilities in the areas required. This individual was adept at dealing with all levels of the organization in order to bring the desired benefits that the client was seeking.

Benefits to the Client

As a result of IBS's engagement with this client, the following accomplishments were achieved:

• Development of an IT Management infrastructure which resulted in:
  • Skill set evaluation of the existing IT staff in relation to the demands of the jobs being performed.
  • Establishment of an IT performance appraisal and review process
  • Elimination of unnecessary overtime resulting in the savings of tens of thousands of dollars
  • Development of IT accountability standards the practice.
  • Standardization of all corporate hardware and where possible, operating systems in order to maximize purchasing power and to have the ability to manage growth and change in an orderly fashion.
• Implementation of a high speed replacement data communications network which allowed for superior disaster recovery capabilities, growth and the portability in the event the client were to relocate its office on a temporary or permanent basis.
• Implementation of a formal Help Desk function serving on-site and off-site users.
• Improved user relations through hands-on involvement at user meetings, improved response to user problems and the development of a more professional staff.
• Improved HIPAA security compliance, both from an IT perspective as well as from a physical security perspective.
• In an effort to improve efficiency and properly budget for future expenditures, evaluated existing major systems in order to verify:
  • They were running on current versions (where possible) for maximum functionality.
  • There was a corporate understanding of the modules that were owned and what they were capable of providing the enterprise.