On the middle of neighborhood care, a lifeline for psychological well being is making an enduring influence — strengthened by know-how that ensures safety with out compromising compassion.
Psychological-health middle Household and Kids’s Companies (FCS), based mostly in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has helped rework the lives of members of its area people with applications to assist their well-being, together with little one abuse and trauma assist, in addition to counseling for households and people affected by substance abuse and dependancy. The group is greater than 100 years previous, serves greater than 150,000 individuals every year, and presents providers in additional than 50 colleges. It additionally greater than doubled its employees lately and now has 1,500 staff who present quite a lot of providers, many who have moved on-line because the begin of the pandemic.
These adjustments created a problem for FCS CIO Brent Harris, who was answerable for defending a quickly rising group with a sprawling IT surroundings and a growth within the variety of endpoints in use. At first of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, FCS distributed roughly 2,000 iPads and different units to purchasers in order that clinicians may provide teletherapy and telemedicine providers. That introduced the entire variety of units that wanted to be managed to round 3,500.
FCS was prepared to spend on its core mission — serving the neighborhood’s psychological well being wants — so most of its headcount progress was in its medical employees. However Harris nonetheless needed to handle with the identical variety of IT employees to maintain prices down. Automation was key to fixing this problem.
“We would have liked a option to automate, to purchase again time as an alternative of attempting to unravel issues with manpower,” Harris says. “We attempt to remedy issues with know-how.”
Piloting an Endpoint Administration Platform
The IT employees wanted visibility into which software program packages had been on every machine and whether or not the units had been being patched correctly. The legacy system in use did not give Harris the arrogance that his crew had that perception.
“Gadgets had been on the community that we did not see, and software program was on somebody’s machine that should not be there that we did not choose up on,” Harris says. “Many of the issues we discovered we discovered manually.”
When FCS deployed Tanium as a part of a pilot, the endpoint administration platform instantly discovered units that the legacy system had missed, Harris says. A tragic incident locally shortly after illustrated the significance of getting endpoint administration know-how with an correct view of the surroundings.
“There was an occasion in our neighborhood the place there was an lively shooter, not at Household and Kids’s Companies, however at a healthcare facility that quite a lot of us had been acquainted with,” Harris says. “Lots of people in our company had labored there previously or had associates there, and so it actually hit close to residence.”
FCS wanted a dependable worker notification system to make sure that the healthcare supplier was ready if an analogous state of affairs had been to unfold. FCS was searching for a assure that everybody would obtain data — equivalent to worker notifications and software program updates — pushed out by the system onto their particular person units.
“We might push it out to 1,000 endpoints after which get a report that stated 796 of them obtained it, and we must manually go attempt to determine the place there have been gaps,” Harris says. “Tanium is much better at doing that. And on this case, you already know, it is actually life or demise. If that state of affairs had been to ever happen, we have to ensure that 100% of the units on the community have the agent put in and it is operating.”
A trial run is an important a part of evaluating which applied sciences to buy and deploy as a result of it might assist illuminate how nicely the answer meets the group’s wants, Harris says.
“We had been in a position to do a pilot, and we had been fairly satisfied inside a matter of days and weeks, not months, that this instrument was going to be an important a part of our know-how stack going ahead,” he provides.