StratusPointIT

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

The name of our company is APS Medical Billing, and we provide physician's medical billing services in several states in the United States.

What is your position?

I am the MIS [management information system] director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with ComputerSupport.com?

We wanted to outsource our IT [information technology] completely – from procurement to network engineering all the way to help desk support – really, everything. We previously had an employee that took care of our help desk, and we had to hire consultants for the higher-level engineering tasks. We knew if would be a better long-term decision to find a capable partner rather than trying to fill the gap internally with a permanent resource. 

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in more detail.

I think of them as our own IT department within the company. We have a help desk that's covered 24/7 by them, and we have several network engineers. We have a network infrastructure kind of person – one working with the servers and the other one working with the switches and the routers – and so on. Then, we have an account manager that speaks with me all the time if I have an issue, problem, or new idea – something I want to bounce off them, along the lines of, "Hey, how can we do this better, faster, and smarter?" I have an account manager who will hear me out, research things, bring me back options, and kind of talk me through different options and approaches.

Then, also part of their team is the procurement crew. One of our major projects that we're just finishing up is, we moved into the VM [virtual machine] environment for our Windows servers and UNIX servers. They are really the complete resource, and I think of my account manager as my director of IT. The help desk person that's here is just an extension of our group of employees.

They also handle the security of our networks. They have a whole backup methodology worked out. We have offsite backups, and we are utilizing the cloud when it makes sense. We have never had a security breach. They are very good at staying on top of keeping track of vulnerabilities, weak points on our site. As you know, these hackers work 24/7/365, and there's always something new coming at you. We run vulnerability scans a couple of times a year, and those reports are reviewed, and changes to our network security servers are made accordingly. We try to be as proactive as possible on that. Security and the integrity of our data is very important to us and ComputerSupport has been a real asset.

How did you come to work with ComputerSupport.com?

We met one of the owners when he was working as a consultant for a different company. We had him in here doing some of our engineering work, and that was many years ago. He let us know that he was going to be starting his own company with a partner. When they actually formed that company, we decided to become one of their first customers.

What is the status of this engagement?

We might be going on six or seven years. It's been quite awhile.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Our network downtime is minuscule. If it's down, it's scheduled for regular maintenance. We're very lucky, but we're also very proactive with things. Servers are under warranty and things are fixed and addressed as soon as things don't look right. Proactive is a good word to describe them.

As a medical billing service, we're open six days a week, and we have people working in three time zones, so we're open all of the time pretty much. There are people working all the time. They are very responsive to that and they understand. They can take their technology and make it work in our business model. They know the 15th of the month and the end of the month is very important to us and treats it as such. They understand the priority of how to work a problem, and that's probably because we've been together for so long.

ComputerSupport.com does an outstanding job. If you have issues that are out of your control – say your Internet service provider is down – we have a failover plan, and they can move us to that failover plan within an hour so that our business day is not impacted heavily. I think that they put a lot of planning into things, so that when issues do come up, you can mitigate them very quickly and move on with your day. It's a very predictable and intelligent approach.

What distinguishes ComputerSupport.com from other providers?

They have a phenomenally well-credentialed and intelligent group of technical professionals. We've been consistently impressed by them.

Is there anything ComputerSupport.com could have improved or done differently?

I think that the only feedback that I've ever given them is probably pertaining to our help desk, our tier one kind of support, and getting the right person in that job. As you can imagine, that can be a frustrating position, dealing with all sorts of people and all sorts of problems, people with all sorts of different skill sets and levels of understanding when it comes to IT.

In the past, we've definitely had some help desk folks that weren't well matched to us. I meet with them every Tuesday, and we discuss things like that in our weekly meetings. The issues have always been addressed in a timely fashion, and the help desk folks that weren't a good match for us moved on and another person took over. We're very happy with how that works. They really make my life so much easier. I can sleep at night.