Their IT service provider wasn’t meeting expectations. With the quality of patient care on the line, this isolated hospital found the partner they needed in Synoptek!
| Customer: Yampa Valley Medical Center | Profile: A nonprofit, non-tax-supported, independent community hospital dedicated to serving the needs of residents throughout Northwest Colorado and visitors from around the world.
Services: IT Consulting |
| Size: 501-1,000 employees | |
| Region: Steamboat Springs, CO | |
| Industry: Hospital & Health Care |
Business Need
Yampa Valley Medical Center (YVMC) is a nonprofit, non-tax supported, independent community hospital dedicated to serving the needs of residents throughout Northwest Colorado and visitors from around the world. Yampa Valley Medical Center is a 39- bed acute care hospital providing sophisticated medical services to more than 51,000 outpatients annually, which features a full-service acute care hospital including emergency care, surgical services and the Family Birth Place with a Special Care Nursery. They also provide comprehensive therapy and rehabilitation services including a swing unit offering short-term rehabilitation stays for ski area visitors and others.
YVMC is located in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a small remote resort community with a large ski area, very isolated from the rest of the state.
Yampa’s Challenge
“We had a relationship with another outsourcing IT vendor that wasn’t going well,” explains Robert Flake, Chief Financial Officer for YVMC, “We had difficulties in our infrastructure, in how our network was built, and being able to staff the IT department.”
“Responsiveness is critically important to a healthcare environment, adds Mark Clark, CIO at YVMC. “Time matters a huge amount when providing care to patients so if our systems are not available the providers, physicians, nurses, and other techs can’t get the best level of care to the patients so we have to be very responsive 24/7.”
Solution and Approach
YVMC determined to find a well-qualified partner to replace their current substandard service with the kind of excellent service that would translate into superior patient care.
“There were a number of reasons why we selected Synoptek,” explains Clark. “One, they were regionally based so we didn’t have to depend on someone who was far away. We could travel to their operations and have conversations with people face-to-face.”
“They were also within the healthcare industry in Colorado. There are other hospitals in Colorado that use Synoptek that have the same IT platforms as we have. We found this to be very valuable.”
“Synoptek was able to come in and assess our network,” adds Clark, “our server infrastructure and hardware, training and educational level of the staff, qualifications of the staff and they were able to give us a very good summary report that told us all of the gaps that we had within our organization and what we should be doing and how we should prioritize filling all those gaps.
Flake adds, “By bringing Synoptek into the organization we were able to actually reduce our cost of operating our IT system. We were able to insource some of the functions and transfer other functions to Synoptek at a lower cost than we ever could with our previous partner.”
Business Results
According to CIO Mark Clark, “Synoptek for us is a partner that helps us provide technical resources we can’t normally afford to have in our size community. They provide Tier 2 and Tier 3 support for our network and server operations.”
“They also act as the consultative group for us whenever we’re doing new designs and new system implementations. Also, they provide help desk systems so we can track trouble tickets and keep track of the issues that we’re maintaining and fixing.
Synoptek really treat us as a partner
“I think the relationship with Synoptek has been a very strong one,” says Flake. “They are responsive, they are knowledgeable and they are always focused on meeting our needs. They’ve moved me from a model of being concerned about our IT operations to a place where I’m comfortable sleeping at night.”
Adds Clark, “I think what makes Synoptek most unique for us is that they really treat us as a partner. There are a lot of companies out there that can provide network operations, monitoring, and server support that can offer higher levels of technical expertise than what we ourselves have here, but a true partner is one who always works with us on our goals and objectives.”
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