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Developing a Scalable Cloud Solution Architecture for the Ephraim McDowell Health System

In Search of a Mission Critical, Cloud-based Solution

The Ephraim McDowell Health system is a comprehensive, integrated healthcare delivery entity that has been named as one of the 100 Greatest Community Hospitals in America. Servicing more than 119,000 residents from six counties in central Kentucky, the core of the system is Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center, a non-profit, 222-bed licensed hospital located in Danville, Kentucky.

In addition, they also staff the Ephraim McDowell Fort Logan Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital located in Lincoln County (Stanford) and Ephraim McDowell James B. Haggin Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital located in Mercer County (Harrodsburg). The Ephraim McDowell Health System is tasked with supporting each hospital’s mission and enabling effective, cross-functional IT solutions for each location and their employees.

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The Problem
The Solution
The Result
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The Problem

Ephraim McDowell Health was operating on MS Exchange and had been evaluating both Office 365 and Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite) as potential cloud-based email solutions. They needed a cloud-based solution that had flexible pricing options and would meet the needs of their end-users.

At the time of their evaluation in 2016, Ephraim McDowell Health was seeking a solution for about 2,000 users, 400 of whom were full-time employees. The remaining 1,600 users were nurses at the hospitals that currently had no email solution but required a “lite” version of the email solution.

During their evaluation, the Ephraim McDowell Health CIO, Gary Neat, was also seeking to improve collaboration and improve cost savings by moving to a cloud-based email solution.

The Solution

KSM Consulting worked closely with Ephraim McDowell Health to validate their IT and business requirements, security and compliance requirements, and establish integration points between their legacy systems and Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite). After developing a strategy, KSM Consulting employed its off-the-shelf, proven transition methodology in order to successfully move Ephraim McDowell Health and its 2,000 users to the Google-based solution:

  • KSM Consulting deployed Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite) to Ephraim McDowell in two separate transition phases that targeted distinct groups of users: Phase I Core IT and Early Adopters and Phase II Final Go-Live.
  • The phased approach resulted in reduced risk, lower cost of deployment, and optimized user experience.
  • KSM Consulting mapped Ephraim McDowell’s business processes with G Suite’s application functionality and designed a comprehensive change management strategy to prepare each user for the coming change.
  • Onsite and virtual training on each application with role-based training for executives, administrators, IT administrators, internal IT help desk staff, customer service representatives, average users, deskless users was employed to solidify the transition and sheppard users into the new environement.

KSM Consulting’s Google Certified Deployment Specialists configured the G Suite domain and services for use, set up Google Vault, provisioned users, and implemented Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS).

In addition, our Google Migration Specialists engineered the migration tool, CloudMigrator, to migrate email, calendar, and contact data for Ephraim McDowell Health’s 400 employees from MS Exchange to G Suite for Business. KSM Consulting’s Google Certified Trainers and change management specialists developed targeted communication to all end users to notify and prepare them for their new email platform transition.

KSM Consulting’s Google Certified Trainers delivered onsite Google Drive training to ensure users were experienced with real-time collaboration, features, and functionality within Docs, Sheets, Slides, and the power of Google Drive, along with a series of trainings of G Suite for administrators and end-users in a virtual instructor-led training (VILT) format.

In addition, we provided deployment, go-live support, and project management services throughout the duration of the six-week project.

The Result

KSM Consulting deployed Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite) in May 2017 to 1,600 Ephraim McDowell users. KSM Consulting’s dedicated Business Transformation team provided customer support services during and after the health system’s transition to the new platform. To date, KSM Consulting has supported Ephraim McDowell Health during its acquisition of another hospital, which required provisioning for an additional 300 users.

Once the email migration was complete, Ephraim McDowell Health again called on its dedicated team from KSM Consulting to perform a shared folders file migration from an aging Windows Server to Google Drive (with an additional assessment of servers for future migrations).

By going Google, Ephraim McDowell Health received $50,000 in cost reimbursements on user provisioning and user adoption from the transition. In addition, KSM Consulting was also able to configure flexible pricing options, which allowed Ephraim McDowell Health to deploy G Suite for Business for their 400 employees and G Suite Deskless for their 1,600 mobile nurses.

 

This post was originally shared on TempusNova.com. KSM Consulting acquired Tempus Nova, a 20-year-old, award-winning consultancy that exclusively provides Google Cloud solutions and implementation consulting across the nation, in early 2021. Identified by CIO Review as one of the Top 10 Most Promising Google Consulting Services Companies in 2019, Tempus Nova is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and a GCP Premiere Partner. Further, it is a Google Certified Training Organization and has migrated more applications to Google App Engine than any other Google partner.