Amedisys Takes Control of Remote Management with Intel vPro
A U.S. home healthcare provider leverages an untapped resource to make remote device management faster, easier and more secure, with help from CDW’s Intel vPro Activation service.
It sounded almost too good to be true: easier management of remote devices, a better user experience and lower costs.
But in 2022, that’s precisely what home healthcare provider Amedisys found when they looked for a new remote monitoring and management solution and learned that the laptops they had just purchased all had the RMM tools they needed via the built-in Intel vPro® platform.
With help from CDW’s Intel vPro® Activation service, Amedisys could improve its Tier 2 workflow and cancel its existing RMM solution to save $130,000 annually. As it turns out, Intel vPro® was as good as it sounded.
Headquartered in Baton Rouge, La., Amedisys offers services to more than 465,000 patients annually in 37 states and Washington, D.C. It has about 14,000 clinicians in the field who carry Android tablets, as well as 1,200 remote corporate employees and 7,000 regional staff who use laptops. Regional employees handle clinician scheduling and other tasks from 517 care centers, so if a laptop problem occurs, it can quickly affect patient care.
Bringing a Latent Functionality to Life
Before implementing Intel vPro®, device management was frustrating for IT and disruptive for users, says Michael Phillips, vice president of enterprise solutions at Amedisys.
The previous RMM solution lacked robust technical capabilities and primarily served to locate lost or stolen devices. When any of the 8,200 laptop users experienced problems, Phillips’s team had to schedule time to remote-in and hope the connectivity would be sufficient to resolve the issue. If it wasn’t, the user would have to send in their laptop and wait for a replacement.
By fall 2022, Phillips says, Amedisys had decided that “we needed to invest in a reliable tool that we could support the field on.”
A small Amedisys team flew to Chicago to discuss the company’s options with CDW, evolving their relationship from mainly customer and supplier to include more strategic talks about the home healthcare organization’s IT goals.
Ed Lewis (left), Manager of Enterprise Systems at Amedisys, and Vice President of Enterprise Solutions Michael Phillips worked with CDW to enable a better remote monitoring and management solution.
“It was a great experience to sit around a table with the experts that CDW brought in to help us learn about capabilities we already owned and then to help us put it into practice.”
— Ed Lewis, Manager of Enterprise Systems, Amedisys
CDW Solution Architect Brad Kerstetter pointed out that Amedisys could achieve significant savings by activating its Intel vPro®-enabled laptops — at no cost — instead of buying a new RMM solution. The Intel vPro® platform, housed on a chipset within the laptop CPU, is a powerful tool for remote management and troubleshooting. Intel® Active Management Technology allows remote diagnosis of problems that keep computers from booting, with features such as hardware-level remote keyboard, video and mouse control (KVM). Intel AMT allows IT teams to discover, repair and help protect networked computing assets as easily as if working in person, even if an end user has a blue screen or failed OS.
As Kerstetter tells it: “The Intel vPro® platform was already in the devices they had purchased, so that was a latent functionality that was lying dormant in their systems all along.”
Amedisys wasn’t alone in not realizing that the Intel vPro® platform had the RMM features they needed, according to Traci Taylor, enterprise client technical specialist at Intel. When Intel became aware that many of its customers owned Intel vPro®-enabled devices but weren’t fully leveraging the platform, Joab Paiva, Americas commercial scale strategy lead at Intel, worked with Kristy Sizelove, Intel client program manager at CDW, to build out and operationalize a funded activation service at CDW in 2021 to offer to customers and scale the program. Though some Intel vPro® features are available out of the box, customers must activate the management tools so they can configure them for a specific environment.
Kerstetter and CDW Senior Account Manager Doug Hill recognized that Intel vPro® was the perfect solution for Amedisys. The healthcare provider agreed, and after performing due diligence on Intel vPro®’s alignment with its security policies and procedures, it decided to proceed.
Simple and Seamless Remote Device Management
Part of Intel vPro®’s appeal is that it’s straightforward, Kerstetter says. “It’s as simple as going into their software management tool and pushing out a new application to the devices. You can activate tens of thousands of devices in under an hour.”
A CDW engineer installed and configured the server with which the devices would communicate and then guided Amedisys’s team through the activation process. The engineer then worked with Amedisys Systems Administrator Marc Gleason to install Intel’s cloud-based Endpoint Management Assistant software on approximately 8,200 laptops. EMA enables a secure connection to a device through Intel’s Active Management Technology, even if a device is powered off or the operating system is down.
“The beauty of Intel’s EMA tool is that it’s simple and intuitive,” Kerstetter says. “If you’ve worked in a management console for five minutes, you’ll know how to use this.”
Activating Intel vPro® transformed the day-to-day experience for Phillips’s Tier 2 team. Gone are the time-consuming logistics of scheduling time with end users, interrupting their work and shipping laptops back and forth. IT staffers can remotely troubleshoot, reimage machines and reinstall Windows, handle patches and encryption, and perform other tasks.
“They’re seeing the end user’s device and all of the detailed diagnostic information that they need to identify the problem and then offer a fix,” Hill says.
The IT team receives about 10,000 support tickets each month and strives to solve each within an average of eight minutes, Phillips says. That means efficiency is a must, especially if an issue affects patient care; for example, when care center staffers can’t use their laptops, they can’t schedule clinician visits for patients who may unexpectedly need care.
The Tier 1 team resolves about 80 percent of issues and escalates the remainder to the six-person Tier 2 team. In the past, Phillips says, labor-intensive remote support made it challenging to eliminate the ticket queue completely. But now, “we’re able to solve every ticket, every day.”
While Phillips’s team focuses on troubleshooting, Ed Lewis, Amedisys’s manager of enterprise systems, uses Intel vPro® for proactive tasks such as running scans, updating Windows and managing encryption. For corporate and back-office users, Intel vPro®’s streamlined support means less downtime and minimal disruption.
50%
The percentage of IT and security professionals across industries who are “somewhat confident” their teams have sufficient visibility into their cybersecurity landscape
Source: CDW, “Cybersecurity Issues Are More Alike Than Different Across Industries,” June 2024
Innovating with IT Through Thoughtful Partnership
Amedisys is so pleased with Intel vPro® that it’s phasing out clinicians’ tablets and replacing them with Intel vPro®-enabled laptops. In addition, Lewis says, every new laptop the company deploys now has Intel vPro® configured as part of Windows Autopilot provisioning.
He and Phillips continue to look for new ways to leverage Intel vPro®, such as integrating it with ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams to further automate the device management workflow.
“We are industry-leading when it comes to a lot of technologies,” Lewis says. “We challenge ourselves.”
Amedisys’s desire to innovate makes it crucial to have partners that can help the company push the envelope and try new things. CDW established credibility during the Chicago meeting by focusing on the solutions they could offer — not on what they could sell, Lewis adds.
“That resonated with me,” he says. “That’s what a partnership’s about.”
That meeting — and the trust that resulted from it — led to an ongoing relationship as Amedisys and CDW collaborate on other projects.
“It was a great experience to sit around a table with the experts that CDW brought in to help us learn about capabilities we already owned and then to help us put it into practice,” Lewis says. “CDW has always been a good listener, and they always bring the right people to the table.”
Philips adds, “We trusted that they were in it for our best interests.”
For Hill, asking good questions, listening carefully and assimilating that information into an insightful solution are central to CDW’s approach. “You can’t solve problems unless you know what the problem is,” he says. “Sometimes, it’s a little deeper than what the customer tells you.”
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