On the heart of group care, a lifeline for psychological well being is making a long-lasting influence — strengthened by expertise that ensures safety with out compromising compassion.
Psychological-health heart Household and Kids’s Companies (FCS), based mostly in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has helped rework the lives of members of its local people with packages 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 folks every year, and affords providers in additional than 50 colleges. It additionally greater than doubled its employees in recent times 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 setting and a increase within the variety of endpoints in use. At the start of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, FCS distributed roughly 2,000 iPads and different units to purchasers in order that clinicians might provide teletherapy and telemedicine providers. That introduced the overall variety of units that wanted to be managed to round 3,500.
FCS was prepared to spend on its core mission — serving the group’s psychological well being wants — so most of its headcount development 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 approach to automate, to purchase again time as a substitute of making an attempt to resolve issues with manpower,” Harris says. “We attempt to resolve issues with expertise.”
Piloting an Endpoint Administration Platform
The IT employees wanted visibility into which software program packages have been on every gadget and whether or not the units have been being patched correctly. The legacy system in use did not give Harris the arrogance that his crew had that perception.
“Units have been on the community that we did not see, and software program was on somebody’s gadget 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 expertise with an correct view of the setting.
“There was an occasion in our group the place there was an energetic shooter, not at Household and Kids’s Companies, however at a healthcare facility that lots of us have been accustomed to,” Harris says. “Lots of people in our company had labored there previously or had mates 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 identical state of affairs have been to unfold. FCS was searching for a assure that everybody would obtain data — reminiscent of worker notifications and software program updates — pushed out by the system onto their particular person units.
“We’d push it out to 1,000 endpoints after which get a report that stated 796 of them acquired it, and we must manually go strive to determine the place there have been gaps,” Harris says. “Tanium is much better at doing that. And on this case, you understand, it is actually life or demise. If that state of affairs have been to ever happen, we have to make it possible for 100% of the units on the community have the agent put in and it is operating.”
A trial run is a necessary a part of evaluating which applied sciences to buy and deploy as a result of it could actually assist illuminate how nicely the answer meets the group’s wants, Harris says.
“We have been in a position to do a pilot, and we have been fairly satisfied inside a matter of days and weeks, not months, that this software was going to be a vital a part of our expertise stack going ahead,” he provides.
