AllianceChicago: Connecting a Healthcare Network Through a Highly Available EHR Application
AllianceChicago is a healthcare organization with a mission to improve personal, community and public health through innovative collaboration. A network of 72 community health centers rely on AllianceChicago’s technology infrastructure to collaborate efficiently, access patient-critical data, and provide high-quality patient care. When the organization needed to improve the uptime of an integrated electronic health record (EHR) platform for its extensive healthcare network, it looked to Burwood Group to help ensure the availability of its underlying infrastructure.
The Challenge: Improve Uptime of a Critical SaaS Application
Problem Highlights:
Frequent downtimes for 20+ minutes
Ineffective helpdesk
Reduced productivity
AllianceChicago maintained a hosting environment and knew that the environment was not being monitored or supported optimally. IT monitoring and support improvements were essential because AllianceChicago’s critical EHR application was running on its private cloud infrastructure. The EHR platform, athenaPractice™, needed to deliver customized content, as well as implementation approaches and workflow insights to AllianceChicago’s healthcare network with application availability that the community health centers could count on.
Infrastructure uptime was critical for AllianceChicago’s health center network so practitioners could make more informed clinical, operational, and financial decisions that supported better patient care. Prior to working with Burwood on improving uptime, AllianceChicago struggled with downtime that occurred frequently and for 20 minutes or longer each event during business hours.
In addition, AllianceChicago’s older helpdesk tool did not allow the company to efficiently manage customer requests for support and track changes with precision to reduce incidents. The organization could not produce actionable reports or track work within their systems as a result. This issue directly impacted the productivity of AllianceChicago’s operations teams to respond to incidents and service requests when needed.
Burwood had previously completed a few professional services engagements with AllianceChicago that yielded successful results. When AllianceChicago needed to improve its infrastructure uptime, monitoring, and support, the organization chose Burwood with the expectation that their engagement would evolve positively over time.
The Solution: Burwood’s IT Management and Monitoring Expertise
After assessing AllianceChicago’s needs, Burwood Group’s recommended solution for improving uptime was twofold:
Proactively observe IT operations and infrastructure to respond to smaller incidents more quickly and avoid downtime altogether and
Improve AllianceChicago’s infrastructure operations and support toolset to resolve downtime more efficiently.
To help AllianceChicago proactively monitor its IT environment to avoid downtime, Burwood’s Intelligent Operations team helped the organization generate reports for continuous service improvements. Burwood also ensured that AllianceChicago’s reporting data had the correct structure for effective monitoring of its infrastructure. The service supported was AllianceChicago’s healthcare network through Citrix via Burwood’s Modern Workplace solutions.
AllianceChicago leveraged Burwood to customize a new service portal. Burwood’s solution architects built and deployed this portal using a ServiceNow instance with IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) modules that addressed AllianceChicago’s customized needs to improve infrastructure operations and support. Some of Burwood’s ServiceNow customizations include integrated IT billing, upgrades, request workflow processes, and IT administration services.
AllianceChicago later enlisted Burwood’s Managed Services team to deliver continuous ServiceNow customizations and upgrades. The organization is also currently leveraging Burwood Managed Services to manage and monitor the cloud infrastructure that AllianceChicago’s athenaPractice™ solution is running on.
The Outcome: Improved Uptime, Streamlined Operations, and Cost Savings
TSince implementing Burwood’s Intelligent Operations and Managed Services solutions, AllianceChicago no longer experiences the same problems it did with uptime previously. According to Matt Sterling, AllianceChicago’s Senior Director of IT, “When I first started at AllianceChicago almost eight years ago, our IT infrastructure was down for 20 minutes almost every day. After engaging with Burwood Group, if we’re down 20 minutes a month, that’s unusual.”
“ “When I first started at AllianceChicago almost eight years ago, our IT infrastructure was down for 20 minutes almost every day. After engaging with Burwood Group, if we’re down 20 minutes a month, that’s unusual.””
Engaging Burwood has provided additional benefits beyond significantly improved uptime. Since Burwood created a customized healthcare IT service portal for the organization, AllianceChicago has realized faster incident response times and improved accuracy in its infrastructure monitoring and internal reporting practices.
Cost savings have also been realized from the solution. Implementing Burwood’s Modern Workplace solution has helped provide AllianceChicago with a more flexible way of handling licensing, particularly with their Citrix licenses used to deliver the athenaPractice™ platform across the health network. Now, AllianceChicago can scale their licenses up and down based on their needs from month to month.
Burwood’s Managed Services have also provided AllianceChicago with significant OpEx savings. Matt noted: “With Burwood Managed Services, I don’t have to staff five people with five different skill sets to cover 24x7 monitoring and have the skill sets that provide support as needed. This solution has provided huge savings on OpEx spend while also giving us the ability to provide better IT coverage.”
The seven-year relationship between AllianceChicago and Burwood continues to evolve and grow with its technology. Matt acknowledged, “As the athenaPractice™ application changes and grows and we need to change our infrastructure to support it, we’ve had the help and flexibility from Burwood to support those needs.”
Building on the success of their athenaPractice™ platform, AllianceChicago’s expansion into providing athenaOne® will be supported by the Burwood Intelligent Operations team with changes to the ServiceNow platform to support new types of requests. As AllianceChicago continues to leverage public cloud solutions for select purposes, Burwood has remained an invaluable resource to the AllianceChicago team in planning and implementation support.
Since first working with AllianceChicago, Burwood Group has expanded its engagements in AllianceChicago’s healthcare network by working with some of the health centers that make up the network. After learning that Burwood supports the hosted infrastructure that AllianceChicago’s EHR platforms run on, the health centers selected Burwood as a partner for professional services engagements.
Burwood Group Expertise
““With Burwood Managed Services, I don’t have to staff five people with five different skill sets to cover 24x7 monitoring and have the skill sets that provide support as needed. This solution has provided huge savings on OpEx spend while also giving us the ability to provide better
IT coverage.””
