Advanced net monitoring lets outsourcer deliver more for less

Computerworld - Lenox Hill Medical Group in Manhattan enjoys tremendous IT support from its service provider, ITelagen, says Lenox Hill's IT administrator, Drew Nietert. "The neat thing is when someone calls the ITelagen help desk, more than 80% of time they get a live body, and if it is not a hardware issue, they remote in and fix the problem or talk the person through fixing it. The response on hardware issues is 24 to 36 hours for replacements."

And ITelagen provides this level of service for about the cost of one full-time employee. The secret, says Nietert, is that "ITelagen monitors everything they can remotely over the network: fan speeds, CPU temperatures, smart technology on the hard drives. They come out and fix things before they fail."

This actually costs them less than the normal "fire brigade" support model of responding when users call in problems. Of course it can't catch everything; equipment still fails without warning sometimes, and when that happens, the provider responds. But the key to the savings that the boutique medical provider passes on to its clients is its intense use of advanced, network-based technology to monitor everything in its clients' shops and, as much as possible, anticipate problems.

It was not always that way at Lenox Hill, however. Until late in 2006, Lenox Hill Community Physicians was associated closely with Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital, which supplied all its IT support. This consisted of an old green-screen, dumb-terminal system. "It took two weeks to get anything -- a toner cartridge, a broken terminal -- fixed or replaced," Nietert says.

When the physicians group, which consists of about 70 doctors covering family practice and multiple specialties, decided for business reasons to break away from the hospital in the fall of 2006, it did so with no IT staff or assets. "Not a single person," Nietert says.

To fill that gap, it hired the JHD Group, a national medical practice support organization that was already providing infrastructure support, including IT, to a similar medical organization, the Manhattan Physician Group. This was how Nietert, who works for JHD and acts as Lenox Hill's head of IT, became associated with Lenox Hill.

JHD and Nietert walked into a mess. Lenox Hill had about two months to replace what it was using. And those systems were so antiquated that there was no question of simply duplicating the existing system.

"No one knew how the software worked or even where the server was. Nothing was documented," he says.

Nietert had to manage a full forklift replacement and move Lenox Hill's support staff from about vintage 1981 to 2007. While most of the doctors had PCs in their offices, some of the support staff had to be trained in using a mouse. Given the short time frame JHD had to create a modern infrastructure, outsourcing was the logical strategy, and JHD turned to ITelagen, a provider with which it had experience.