November 2, 2022
Assisted Living Industry Leader Reduces Software Spend and Sprawl by Expanding SolarWinds Service Desk Company Wide
About Saber Healthcare
Founded in 2001 with just two senior living facilities near Cleveland, Ohio, Saber Healthcare today operates over 100 skilled nursing facilities throughout seven states in the Eastern United States. The healthcare group combines expert, professional care, and compassion with cutting-edge innovation in patient care.
And as an organization focused on delivering the finest healthcare and support for families, having the right IT solution in place is critical to their life-enhancing work. In all, there are around 4,000 staff at Saber, including nurses and other healthcare practitioners who work directly with patients.
“We have everything from kiosks on the wall for personal care solutions to a SaaS electronic medical records (EMR) program that we use,” explains Adam Dishong, Senior Systems Engineer at Saber Healthcare Group, who works as part of a team of 11 IT professionals.
The Challenge:
The IT department is critical to the healthcare of patients. So, ensuring it’s always available, even if an extreme weather event such as a hurricane is forecast on the eastern seaboard, isn’t just ‘mission critical”; the health and wellbeing of people depends on it.
“It’s a 24-hour a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year job. There’s no walking away from the work. You must be available at all times. And access to mission-critical software is paramount. SolarWinds Service Desk has been the fabric of our IT department ever since we started using it,” Dishong says.
“We used to use Deskpro, an on-premises, Linux-based solution,” he recalls. “The problem is it comes with a lot of additional overheads, including managing physical space and physical hardware. You also need people with specialized software skills to manage manual upgrades.”
With the above challenges top of mind, Adam elected to conduct a review of SolarWinds Service Desk. As a native cloud-based solution built on AWS leveraging their worldwide data centers, updates and maintenance would be handled entirely by SolarWinds and occur automatically. Equally important, Service Desk would handily meet Saber Healthcare Group’s scalability and availability requirements with its industry-leading 99.999% up-time.
“But it’s not just dealing with the day-to-day operations of systems that’s important,” he added. “Reporting and analytics are also vital, especially in a regulated industry such as healthcare, where unscheduled visits from government agencies are a regular occurrence. Providing an immediate response, and documenting incidents, is essential for regulatory compliance and the long-term health of the business.”
The Solution:
At the heart of Saber’s IT infrastructure is SolarWinds Service Desk, the industry-leading IT service management (ITSM) solution that powers employee support services. Functioning as an integrated module of the Orion Platform already in place, Service Desk provides full visibility across the entire multi-state infrastructure, helping the HIPPA-compliant organization meet its 99.9% service level targets.
Implementation of a new platform is crucial to its success and adoption across the business. It’s been a few years now since Saber implemented SolarWinds Service Desk and Dishong has nothing but praise for the team at SolarWinds.
“The initial meeting with the SolarWinds engineers and their willingness to assist and responsiveness was a big plus for us,” he comments. “It was definitely a very positive experience early on. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve never had a software company as responsive as SolarWinds.”
SolarWinds Service Desk Serves a Dozen Departments
Although Service Desk was originally introduced for IT helpdesk support, as word spread about its effectiveness for automated workflow processes, it’s been rolled out across the entire business.
“We have around a dozen departments, accounts receivable, accounts payable, accounting, IT, marketing, social media requests, legal, HR and payroll, talent acquisition, purchasing, and maintenance, across multiple locations using Service Desk” Adam states.
“I don’t think we have any other software within the entire company that touches all the departments.”
The maintenance team was one of the first parts of the business outside of the IT department to implement the software. Dishong credits SolarWinds Service Desk with completely automated the process of logging building repair jobs, assigning tasks, and reporting when they have been completed.
“I mean, we don’t have to touch it. Job requests just go out, and ‘tick! – they get done!” he states.
And once word got around the rest of the business about the functionality of the system, one by one, all the departments came on board.
Currently, the SolarWinds ITSM platform is serving managers and users in over a dozen departments across Saber Healthcare Group’s multi-location environment:
- Finance: account creation, Bill of Materials support, accounts payable/receivable, invoicing
- Maintenance and Facilities Management: logistics tracking, cleaning, and repair requests, routine maintenance scheduling, security alerts
- Legal: invoice tracking:
- Payroll and Human Resources: talent acquisition, employee onboarding
- Purchasing: PO management, vehicle tracking
- IT: Incident management, asset management, PCC Help Desk, compromised user alerts/resolution, account creation/management, kiosk procurement and tracking, networking break/fix and upgrade and solutions
- Accounting: BOM support, Accounts Payable: Resident Refund Requests, AP staffing payables, AP statements, invoices for communities, new vendor requests, CSDC invoices, Accounts Receivable: RFMS requests
- Legal Department: Legal invoices forwarded for reference; 2 years of invoices referenced on weekly basis
- Marketing: Promo requests, keeping track of orders
- Social Media Requests: All requests from communities, auto-sort based on location
- Talent Acquisition: Incident management: all requests, form created for auto-routing
Service Desk has also been brought to bear for the creation and management of audit trails, custom reporting, and report scheduling across all departments.
The Results:
Elimination of Dedicated Software, Hardware, and Streamlining Procurement Process
Not only has it streamlined how the maintenance department operates, but it also meant that Saber no longer had to spend money on purchasing and implementing a costly dedicated building management software platform.
“That’s what Service Desk can do for you,” Dishong said. “We built that building maintenance process, and it’s been in place for a year and a half now. If you want to talk about quantifiable differences, we literally kicked out the software we didn’t need.”
He also explained that SolarWinds Service Desk was also used to streamline IT hardware procurement in their purchasing department from weeks to just a few days.
Adoption is Simple, Even for the Non-Technical
The adoption of SolarWinds Service Desk across the entire business was made easier by the fact that the product is easy to use, emulating many of the features people recognize from applications such as social media.
But like any new way of doing things, there was also some internal reluctance to change. But as Adam notes, any concerns were short-lived.
“You hear about a lot of pushback. But then, when we do implement a new process, people say, ‘I don’t know why we haven’t done this before!’
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a negative word, there’s always been positive feedback on everything. And now, people actively come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve heard this does a lot of great things for this other department. Can you show me what it does?’”
There is little doubt that SolarWinds Service Desk and its workflow automation have played a significant part in automating processes at Saber Healthcare, not just within IT, but across all the functions that support the business.
“I don’t think there was ever a consideration for anything else after doing our initial research. SolarWinds was always the solution. Everybody always said SolarWinds is the Cadillac of software. And they’re right.”
In the future, Adam and his team at Saber are looking to transition the business to a fully paperless organization, with SolarWinds Service Desk integral to that digital transformation project.
But for now, Adam is happy that he has a solution in place that is responsive and adaptable to the needs of the whole of Saber Healthcare, not just the IT department. And if that means guaranteeing a 99.9% SLA and ensuring staff have the operational support and caregiving resources they need when they need it, he knows they’re doing the most important job of all: looking after patients.
Healthcare Needs Great Technology — and Great Security too
With sensitive personal information such as medical records central to Saber Healthcare’s work, it’s imperative to have the very best security measures in place. SolarWinds Access Rights Manager provides a high level of visibility, enabling Adam and his team to get instant notifications if there is any unusual access on the network
“When you’re dealing with 130 different entities that are not physically located at your same location, visibility is crucial, not just an overall perspective but also a granular level,” said Adam.
