“We have increased the productivity of our IT technicians, with fewer visits to the desktop. By rapidly meeting the needs of our end users, we are freeing up their time to deal with our patients on health care issues.”

-Jeff Pearson, Director, IS Architecture

Formed in 1983, the Bon Secours Health System provides skilled management and professional resources for multiple health care operations serving ten regions in the eastern United States services include acute and long-term care, assisted living, home care, and hospice.

To Bon Secours (translation: “good help”), providing access to critical applications is essential. As part of its mission to provide top quality health care, Bon Secours uses innovative technology solutions. Jeff Pearson, Director, IS Architecture, has overall responsibility for designing and implementing the infrastructure for the organization.

Workstation management was an IT nightmare

Throughout the Bon Secours facilities, PCs are used by doctors, nurses and other staff members. But managing multiple workstations was a major undertaking. It was always difficult and time-consuming to roll out applications for new users, and many tasks were done manually.

Gil Cantillo, Director of IT at Bon Secours Hampton Roads, agreed that the processes were cumbersome and hard to manage. “Management of the workstations was continuous, 24/7, and the call levels were extraordinary,” Cantillo said. “We would send technicians out into the workstation environment, and it would take 45 minutes to an hour just to triage one desktop.” Pearson wanted to standardize on a total PC lifecycle management solution to streamline desktop management.

They consulted with Gartner experts to determine what was available, and discovered that most tools required additional modules for each task, as well as more hardware, which increased the costs.

One console. One architecture. One database.

Glen Krinsky, Senior Network Technician, wanted a solution that was easy to use and maintain, compatible with Active Directory®, and cost effective. “WinINSTALL Desktop Availability Suite was all wrapped up in one package, and did not require additional hardware other than what we already had,” Krinsky noted.

Starting with a proof of concept at the three-hospital local system in Hampton Roads, Virginia, Bon Secours tested WinINSTALL successfully over a year. A Scalable consultant was onsite during installation, writing standards and assisting with training and implementation.

“With WinINSTALL, we can perform client resets and are able to back up user profiles. The reporting feature helps find machines that are missing patches, and we use a lot of the PXE boot processes,” said Krinsky.

WinINSTALL’s client reset template can be drag-and-drop, or scheduled to run. The benefit is that there is no need for a technician to be at the desktop. WinINSTALL DAS also automates PC Hardware Refresh— which enables them to move from old to new machines easily.

WinINSTALL dramatically cuts time…after time

In its Baltimore hospital, Bon Secours has over 650 PCs to maintain— with only two technicians, according to Mike King, Manager of Technical Operations.

“The first day we put in WinINSTALL, we decided to use practical applications and built packages for existing tickets we had. We knocked out 10% of those tickets in a half-hour,” King said. “It would have taken at least a day-and-a-half  to schedule otherwise.”

At Bon Secours Hampton Roads, Glen Krinsky explained that they have over 80 packages already developed and residing on a shared server that he can now deploy to any machine in the local system.

“WinINSTALL cuts the time of deployment on a machine—to include all of the software that it needs—to about 15 minutes. It’s just a real valuable program to allow us to manage our local assets,” Krinsky added.

WinINSTALL DAS is making a significant difference in the way Bon Secours is managing valuable IT assets. “We have increased the productivity of our IT technicians, with fewer visits to the desktop,” explained Jeff Pearson. “By rapidly meeting the needs of our end users, we are freeing up their time to deal with our patients on health care issues, and we are able to provide the ‘good help’ that is the mission of Bon Secours.”