Visiting Nurse Health System
Logicalis conducts IT makeover for Visiting Nurse Health System including upgrades to network and phone system, email migration and managed services.Visiting Nurse Health System (VNHS) is the largest non-profit homecare and hospice provider in Georgia. VNHS employs over 500 people including a very mobile staff of nurses, physical therapists and other clinicians who serve more than 16,000 patients a year in their homes and at the VNHS Hospice Atlanta Center.
Technology plays an important role in maintaining communications between the multiple VNHS offices and their busy field staff. When Christy Brice joined the agency as Chief Information Officer (CIO) in 2006, she realized that several critical components needed upgrading. The healthcare concern’s all-important Unified Communications system was becoming less than dependable, for example, and the file server and email server software was out of date. The IT department had to scour the email store every weekend to find room for new messages. Everything worked, but several components were at the end of support, if not the end of life. Brice remembers wondering anxiously every morning what surprises awaited her that day.
Today, the VNHS IT infrastructure is a stable, scalable platform able to serve the growing needs of VNHS for years to come. The operating system is MS Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory and the environment is now Exchange 2007. The Unified Communications platform has been upgraded to Cisco Call Manager Version 6, opening up the full range of unified communications features that VNHS can add in at its own pace.
“Like renovating an old house”
Although the transformation of the VNHS IT infrastructure was ultimatly successful, “This project was like renovating an old house,” Brice recalls, “We encountered something unexpected at every twist and turn. We’d put in something new, and it would break something old.”
Everything was connected to everything else. Before they could upgrade the Unified Communications system, for example, they needed to upgrade Exchange which, of course, meant they needed to upgrade their email. Throw into that mix the fact that the uninterruptible power supplies at their existing datacenter could not accommodate the new servers, and the whole datacenter needed to be re-located. What began as a significant but manageable infrastructure upgrade generated enough drama for a reality TV show.
A people project
The project at VNHS highlighted the importance of having not just the right technology, but also the right people with the right skills. Brice brought considerable experience to her role as CIO. Before joining VNHS, she served as the Director of the Project Management Organization at EarthLink, where she oversaw all major company initiatives and led the execution of over 100 technology projects. Prior to that she worked in a healthcare technology practice for Ernst & Young and led the technology and operations departments for two startup companies, focusing on healthcare consulting and Internet technologies.
“Christy’s leadership through this project was phenomenal,” says Logicalis’ Account Executive, Art Vinson, who met Brice at a Health Information and Management Systems Society conference and introduced her to Logicalis’ capabilities.
Logicalis Technical Consultant Charles Lan (CCIE) designed the network, voicemail, and contact center upgrades. Much of the existing Cisco network was at the end of its life and had been patched several times over the years. Today, it is an exceptional network. Logicalis’ Delivery Consultant, Geoff Watkins believes it is robust enough, “to run video through it when VNHS is ready.” He adds that he encourages adding unified communications capabilities incrementally to avoid overwhelming users with new technology.
Logicalis Managing Consultant - Email Management Practice, Tom Bridge, headed up the migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007. After a preliminary trip to scope out the situation, Bridge arrived in Atlanta on a Monday fully expecting to be back home for the weekend. He was in Atlanta a month.
One of the challenges that complicated the migration was working with a very mobile staff who took their technology for granted and were in some cases less than enthusiastic about having to change the way they used it. It was hard enough to schedule an opportunity to update the software on their notebook computers; convincing them that a new way of doing things was better than the way they had been doing them for years was a hard sell.
Brice found the upgrade process to be a real eye-opener into how the community at VNHS used technology. “The best thing to come out of it was that the end users didn’t feel as much pain as we did,” she adds. “We bared most of the brunt of it; and that’s okay. That’s how you expect it to be in IT…that’s how you want it to be.”
Blade Bright Spot
One bright spot in the project, notes Bridge, was the easy implementation of the new blade servers from HP, which were specially configured for this project by Logicalis’ Technical Consultant, Matt Pennington.
We were able to configure and deploy six HP blades in 40 minutes,” Bridge says. “That is really cool tech. You load the OS into the management console and when a new blade is inserted, you just say, ‘Use this image and put it on this blade,’ and you’re done.” Logicalis also installed an all-in-one storage system from HP.
If she had to do it all over again, Brice says, one of the things she would do differently would be to lean on Logicalis’ Managed Services earlier than she did. “Their support has been outstanding,” she enthuses, “I’m never made to feel like just another number in the queue, and by working with them we know we have the best practices in place. That’s what they do.”
Brice recently visited the Logicalis Enterprise Business Operations Center (EBOC) in Cincinnati in anticipation of expanding the role of Managed Services in the VNHS in the future.
There are a few things left to do to complete the make-over, but “we’re out of crisis mode and into strategic mode. It’s been a good ride,” Brice adds philosophically. “It was certainly never boring.”
