Managed Services Help a Nonprofit Health and Welfare Agency Accelerate Mental Healthcare Delivery and Achieve Savings of Over $250,000

Business Need

The nonprofit agency provides support to nearly 17,000 individuals across six California counties. With a mission to cultivate hope and resilience for children, adults, and families facing serious mental health challenges, the nonprofit was on the road to success. But as the company grew, it realized that its existing communications apps and legacy technical debt acted as a major roadblock in delivering urgent mental health services to individuals in need.

The agency developed its telepsychiatry offering in 2020 to address the mental wellness needs of at-risk individuals when access to remote care became essential. However, the user experience fell short. Generally dissatisfied with its hosted VoIP platform and faced with growing issues in its former SMS app, the agency migrated from its previous provider to Microsoft Teams.

SMS and group chats became a requirement for scheduling, reminders, support groups, crisis text lines, and text therapy. Texting soon became the desired means of communication for patients and enabled the agency in mental health service engagement and delivery, especially to adolescent patients. Yet,

• The agency struggled under the weight of legacy IT, which required duplicate internal and external information gathering.
• Providers had to enter patient data into an internal EHR system and then replicate it into the county system—which on average, took two weeks to complete.
• The time-consuming use of Excel as the organization’s main platform for data entry was extremely cumbersome.
• Limited capabilities of current communications applications and ineffective procedures prevented it from delivering urgent care to patients.

The nonprofit agency was looking to streamline operations across three broad areas:

• Communication: Streamlining patient and internal communications, including SMS capability
• Automation: Establishing automated data functionality to avoid duplication
• Data Insights: Implementing cohesive data collection capabilities with visual graphs to capture mission-based insights.

Solution and Approach

Synoptek has been an IT Outsourcing partner for the healthcare nonprofit since 2018, offering a range of workforce productivity, application development, and data warehouse services. We built a consolidated strategy to help the nonprofit agency overcome its communication needs. We recommended implementing a host of products, including:

• Microsoft Azure for hosting and authentication-secured access.
• Microsoft 365 to enhance collaboration and Teams Unified Communications to move away from their outdated phone system.
• A customized SMS app for Teams to enable clinicians to communicate with patients in a manner they preferred with added reliability.
• Microsoft Power Automation Platform to significantly reduce duplicate data entry.
• Power BI to create compelling data-based graphs and enable a refined care delivery model.

To meet the nonprofit’s core purpose, Synoptek proposed a unified system built on Microsoft to streamline data collection and communications integration. This approach included:

Proprietary Teams App Development

• We developed a custom Teams app that features one-to-one messaging, broadcasting, group messaging, SMS, MMS, notifications, and emojis.
• By building and implementing this proprietary app, we resolved several text messaging issues in the Teams Phone environment.
• Set within Azure, it is designed to meet strict Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements to protect patients’ sensitive health information.

Process Automation

• We identified the need for process automation to avoid redundancy, accelerate record entry to benefit patients and free up clinician time through the Power Automate Platform.
• We worked closely with the agency to achieve a measurable KPI and reduced the average data entry timeline.

Data Insights

• We transformed the agency’s former data warehouse on Azure Cloud into an integrated business intelligence solution with centralized reporting.
• We also built dashboards to identify response times and statistics to further refine effectiveness and expedite patient care.

Business Benefits

Synoptek’s ITaaS suite allows the nonprofit agency to evolve its operations and effectively provide much-needed, reliable care to patients. The digital transformation of communication creates more opportunities for the agency to better serve and support its community with critical mental care.

• The evolved tech ecosystem helped achieve a revenue increase of 4% and accelerated the mental health provider’s core business goal of reaching more patients.
• Implementation of Microsoft’s Voice solutions streamlined business processes, reduced time spent conducting calls by 1.25 employee hours per week and cut weekly time saving for users by 625+ hours.
• The proprietary Teams app alleviates the need for costly cell phones for 500+ employees who now can utilize Teams numbers and manage phone trees within the single, unified platform.
• The enhanced Azure SQL Data Warehouse offers a powerful BI environment, rich with capabilities and insightful real-time data.
• Migration to the Teams Phone System enabled the team to achieve target goals in time while resulting in savings of over $250,000 to date.
• The new system gives the leadership departmental access to KPIs, democratizes data for self-service from EHRs, and enables advanced capabilities for grants and payroll reports.
• Automation of business processes reduced the average data entry timeline from 13 days to 4 days, surpassing the original goal of 5 days, and ultimately led to a 50% reduction in data entry time.
• The updated infrastructure delivered a 20% increase in compliance and enabled 400 direct care providers, 80 supervisors, and 30 site leaders to serve 5,000+ patients across 22 locations.