Healthcare IT Services Company Makes Innovative Customer Service a Top Priority

Customer Profile

This healthcare IT company connects physicians, clinics, patients and payers across tens of thousands of contracted providers around the world. They are known for leading solutions in the areas of clinical electronic health records (EHR), financial revenue cycle management (RCM) applications and general operational services for small, medium and/or large healthcare organizations. With billions in revenue, over 20,000 employees, and supporting facilities across more than 25 countries world-wide, assuring that their applications services for customers is operating efficiently is the gold standard for the IT organization.

The Challenge

Delivering high quality customer experience with their health IT services is a key initiative for this company. Regardless of whether the customer is leveraging the company’s EMR, RCM, Ambulatory, or some other application, they expect swift responses and continuous availability to their patient and billing information. Delays in accessing this information can negatively impact prompt, efficient patient care. With innovative customer service being a guiding principle for this company, their IT staff had long relied on NETSCOUT® service assurance solutions to stay ahead of, and rapidly troubleshoot customer impacting issues.

Solution in Action

The Health IT Services Company had come to depend on the smart data and smart analytics from the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology for service assurance in their data centers. They were using the nGenius 3900 Series Packet Flow switch to pass the traffic from the network to the InfiniStreamNG appliances and other tools for cost-effective and efficient wire data visibility. They had implemented nGeniusPULSE for infrastructure performance management, as well as, to monitor customer locations for an additional level of innovative IT customer service. The company consistently benefits, in a variety of ways, from information provided by the NETSCOUT’s solutions.

In one case, the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform discovered the response time for one of their customers using their financial services applications was degrading with performance dropping from a normal approximately 60 milliseconds to more than 200 milliseconds, which was unacceptable. Further drill downs revealed that server retransmissions during this same period were also increasing, indicating that communications across the network to the end clients were suffering as well. The IT team was able to discern that there was an issue with the primary WAN link for the customer. They switched the customer over to their back up link and provided the third party WAN provider with the details from nGeniusONE for corrective action, all of which minimized disruption for the customer.

In another situation, customers had reported intermittent connection issues to their services. The recently implemented nGeniusPULSE solution was leveraged and immediately discovered a switch experiencing a high rate of discards (over 15%) that coincided precisely with the period of reported issues from the end users. The information from nGeniusPULSE was shared with the third party switch vendor to resolve the issue.

In another case, a customer reported slowdowns in the financial applications between 11PM and 1AM. One of the challenges in supporting healthcare customers is that it is truly a 24 x 7 x 365 day operation. Finding time for planned maintenance and upgrades is difficult. Unplanned degradations are simply unacceptable. Using nGeniusONE, the IT team discovered a spike in retransmissions for the application during that exact time period. They provided the details to the application development team who had a day-end job running in the background that was consuming cycles and slowing performance of the application itself. The app team stopped this scheduled job from running and predictable response time was restored for that customer.

Finally, the IT team is becoming involved in new customer service introductions. In one recent situation, they used nGeniusPULSE as part of the pre-deployment testing ahead of application rollout for a customer. nGeniusPULSE was used to test connectivity and responsiveness to the healthcare IT services data centers for 24 hours from within the client’s network, discovering several areas of concern, that once handed off to the client’s own IT staff, were corrected and made the initial rollout of the healthcare applications a success.

The Results

Reducing the time to resolve issues experienced by their customers has been the biggest benefit to the IT staff. When it comes to healthcare IT services and applications, time is an imperative, for both safe, swift patient care and employee productivity. From each of the situations above, the IT staff at this company has taken away lessons and made improvements to their service deliver:

• Reduced troubleshooting time and Mean-time-to-Resolve (MTTR) issues reported by their customers. This is reducing negative impact from slowdowns and outages from what could have been days and weeks to hours and even minutes and immediately improves customer service.
• Improved relationships with third party equipment vendors and WAN service providers with reports and details from NETSCOUT solutions that pinpoint the source of the problem.
• Increased collaboration within their own IT department with the network operations teams sharing information and access to the nGeniusONE solution with the application developers. This also improves productivity for their IT employees, but again will help discover customer impacting issues sooner.
• Designed and implemented a new blueprint for new application service rollout to customers with pre-deployment site testing at customer facilities which has raised the level of confidence that the customers have in their new Health IT Services Company and applications.