Iroquois Healthcare Association

Building a unified, hybrid work environment for increased productivity

Iroquois Healthcare Association (IHA) focuses on delivering value daily to their member hospitals. LogicalNet worked with IHA to maximize employee productivity and increase availability and security to all their key systems.

The backstory

The Iroquois Healthcare Association (IHA) is an advocacy group representing more than 50 hospitals and health systems across upstate New York. They work to make positive change through lobbying officials at all levels of state government. IHA helps hospitals overcome workforce shortages and rapidly rising costs, while providing peer group comparisons to establish best-in-class benchmarks.

Challenges & objectives

Ever since the world made a shift to remote work, video calls have become a consistent part of the workday for many employees and at IHA, Zoom calls have remained the preferred way to conduct most business. Zoom calls would take up all their bandwidth, causing extremely slow load times and often resulting in employees being dropped from their calls. That same bandwidth was also required to be shared with application access to shared files, Aastra phones and handheld devices causing a major problem for IHA.

How we helped

LogicalNet’s team upgraded IHA’s internet from cable to fiber, significantly increasing bandwidth in both directions. Simultaneously, LogicalNet upgraded their WIFI and separated the traffic into dedicated groups with different service priorities. The team performed a deep analysis to see which devices IHA’s employees had connected to the network along with their bandwidth consumption. From this analysis, LogicalNet discovered that most people were connecting multiple devices including computers, cell phones, iPads, and even Alexa devices (including the use of music & video streaming services). To fix the problem of maxed out bandwidth, LogicalNet set up a C-Level network to keep the President and VP more secure, along with a guest network for personal devices and an office network with a policy directing only work computers be connected. As part of the network upgrade, LogicalNet also replaced an aging firewall, thereby significantly increasing the level of security protection for the office.

Upgrading the environment also required two new, high-volume printers and a new printer console to control the printers. Andrew Nault at Iroquois Healthcare said that “Everett, Nick, and Patrick were phenomenal in getting the printer console set up and operational.” They needed an onsite server for the printer console, so Everett repurposed and upgraded an unused desktop at a significant cost-savings.

In addition, through LogicalNet, all of IHA’s key systems have been virtualized in a private cloud. Thus, access to all their key data systems is centralized, which not only allows for better centralized security, but also streamlines any employee onboarding or departures, making it easy to add/remove access and facilitate work-from-home while maintaining security.

“From Patrick around security, Nick around Microsoft, to Everett around our whole system, they really know their stuff.”

– Andrew Nault

“We’re a small, local nonprofit and working with another company just like us feels like you’re a part of our family.”

Andrew Nault
Director of Business Development

Results

Employees at IHA have access to all the data and systems they need to maximize their productivity. File access, application use, print jobs and video calls coexist within the same network while not impacting each other. And IHA can rapidly scale their organization without constraint from their IT environment.

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