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 CASE STUDY EVERGREEN FIRE DEPARTMENT |
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| Customer Profile: |
The nation's largest volunteer fire department. |
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| Business Situation: |
Not leveraging technology to gain efficiency or effectiveness. |
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| Solutions: |
Build a technology plan for the next
3 years which will enhance all existing
business processes, then implement and support it. |
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| End Result: |
Management has better reports and can
work more efficiently. The organization
is more connected which improves communication.
Double entry and paperwork have been
greatly reduced which frees up time for other activities. |
The Evergreen Fire Protection District is the nation's
largest volunteer fire department, consists of approximately
25 full time employees and close to 75 volunteers.
The organization maintains a 911 facility, a primary
EMS facility, a primary fire facility, and three
remote fire stations. IT support was previously handled
by a one man operation. There is no support when
he took a vacation or sick time. In addition there
were gaps in the system design in the areas the previous individual
was not an expert.
When management at the fire department sat down with
BNC, their primary concern was that their current
IT support person was not helping them implement
technology which would make them a better organization.
The individual was only responding when something
did not work and responses times were close to 48
hours for phone calls and sometimes a week for an on-site response.
None of the district's facilities were connected
and only one had a connection to the Internet. This
connection was not compliant with the up coming HIPAA
security requirements. Only one building had a server
and it was not being monitored by anyone.
There was no centralized e-mail and contact management
system. Most users had AOL and there was no backup
in place for
data or e-mail.
When there was a 911 call, statistics, patient information
and billing were done by filling out a sheet after
the call and faxing it into the main station. From there it was entered
into a business specific application which was only accessible by
two people.
BNC began by analyzing the business processes and
requirements for the organization. From this we developed
a technology plan which would address these needs
and document requirements over the next 3 years.
We leveraged the experience gained from the
hundreds of times we have done this for other organizations.
BNC also used both their routing and security engineer
to develop a robust security and connectivity solution.
The overall solution required a depth of knowledge
in multiple disciplines which could
never be obtained by any one individual.
The first part of the plan was to improve the server
infrastructure to a point that it would be able to
host the new applications from a central point. This
included new servers, backup and other software.
The second phase was to connect the organization
as a whole. BNC also implemented a new high speed
private wide area network as well as a new internet
connection and implemented a HIPAA compliant firewall.
Once this new infrastructure was in place BNC centralized
all data and existing applications. This allowed
users to access to the new mail server which solved
the e-mail and contact management problems. All critical
data now resides on a server which has a BNC monitored nightly back up.
BNC tackled the antiquated patient information and
billing system problem by assisting Evergreen fire
with the implementation with a new application. The
new application runs on tablet PC's which are in
all vehicles. Field personnel connect wirelessly
to a database server at the main facility. Statistics
and patient information are transmitted in real time
and the need to
fill out incident reports has been eliminated.
Support and response time has been improved by the
team BNC has assigned to Evergreen. When end users
have problems they call into our free support desk.
If the problem is system wide or requires on-site
assistance, the primary or secondary engineer
is dispatched. Response times have been cut to almost
zero for phone support and an average of 3 hours for
on-site response
in non emergency situations. Because of the shift
toward remote administration, many problems can be
resolved remotely
which quickens resolution times and lowers the total
cost of ownership for the system.
BNC now monitors the WAN and servers remotely in
an attempt to identify and resolve problems before
it effects the end users. The customer's solutions
architect meets with senior management on a quarterly
basis. It is because of these sessions BNC can
stay on top of the organizations new goals and ensure
they are using the best technology possible.
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