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LogMeIn to the Rescue

With President Obama’s stimulus package promising billions of dollars for healthcare IT in the U.S., the discussion around electronic health records and other patient-related systems has been pushed to the forefront. While they promise increased efficiencies, improved safety due to consistency, and greater patient and healthcare worker satisfaction, they’ll also challenge IT organizations. Not only are there significant questions unanswered as to how the entire national infrastructure will interoperate, but there’s much to decide on how this integrated infrastructure will be supported.

A critical piece of this puzzle, of course, will be IT’s ability to effectively support the arsenal of end-user devices that will arm medical professionals, whether onsite or offsite, so that workers can access and update key medical and administrative data sources.

The need to support a mobile workforce, as well as administrative personnel working in five satellite offices, drove Palm Valley Health Care, a provider of healthcare and services based in Edinburg, Texas, to search for a Web-based remote connectivity solution that their IT staff could use to fix problems occurring on wireless mobile devices. An early adopter of electronic medical records (EMRs), Palm Valley wanted to ensure their mobile nurses, who work with homebound patients, are readily able to use their handheld devices to access and update server-based patient data. The search led IT administrator Nathan Armstrong to LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile, a remote support solution from Woburn, Mass.-based LogMeIn Inc., that allows service desks to remotely support mobile devices, helping to reduce costs and speed resolution time.

Remote connectivity tools such as LogMeIn offers are greatly improving service delivery across a range of vertical industries. A support technician can diagnose and fix problems on a range of applications and platforms, wherever the worker happens to be — in satellite offices, at home, on the road. These tools mean technicians don’t have to travel to remote locations, or request expensive equipment shipments due to improper diagnosis, or try to decipher lengthy user descriptions of IT problems over the phone. In conjunction with the phone or chat, or through a Web-initiated request, LogMeIn provides assisted support without the need for users to download client-based software.

Diagnosis: Streamlined Support

Like an increasing number of medical facilities, Palm Valley recognized the benefits of migrating from a paper-based approach to EMRs, but, unlike many who are paralyzed by implementation and support issues, they knew the improvements they would gain were worth the upfront costs and effort. By enabling access to individual patient EMRs, and equipping traveling nurses with wireless devices to access and update patient data at the point of contact, Palm Valley hope to see significant benefits: they would allow nurses to spend more quality time with patients, increase efficiencies in medical billing, reimbursement and other administrative processes, and improve the overall quality of care by creating a single paperless record for each patient.

The healthcare provider’s 200 field nurses, who provide personal assistance, therapy and other nursing services to patients living throughout the Rio Grande Valley, can now remotely log-in to the centralized EMR server to retrieve schedules, input patient assessments and access other data. Patient data synchs with related administrative data to allow for more efficient billing and reimbursement.

With such benefits, however, come new remote support challenges, and Palm Valley meets those challenges with LogMeIn Rescue+Mobile, which allows Armstrong and his support team to troubleshoot and fix a range of platform and application issues, including EMR system failure, device-to-database connectivity issues, corrupt files, storage card issues, database rebuilds and numerous other problems. No longer do Armstrong and his team have to talk through problems over the phone, or travel to remote workers to fix problems or have them bring their devices in for diagnosis: Through LogMeIn’s agentless solution, workers simply connect to the service desk through a pin code and technicians can remotely diagnose, control and fix the device’s problems.

“LogMeIn has been a life-saver when it comes to supporting our nurses,” says Armstrong. “Nurses don’t have to drive to the office and back for a support call, which can wipe out a big chunk of their day. And that means they don’t need to miss the remaining appointments scheduled for that day.”

Armstrong reports that Palm Valley’s end users have rapidly taken to the new technology — a key factor to making remote IT management strategies successful. Says Armstrong, “Our nurses love Rescue+Mobile. They think it’s wild that we can take control of their devices, and it cuts down on their office visits, saving driving time and gas, and allowing them to spend more time with patients.”

Supporting the Supporters

Arise Virtual Solutions Inc. is seeing similar benefits from their LogMeIn Rescue deployment. Arise, a technical support services provider, employs more than 5,000 Arise Certified Professionals (ACPs), self-employed home-based agents who serve clients through phone, email and Web-based channels. These agents operate, essentially, as their own virtual support centers, equipped with their own desktop machines and Web-based access to Arise’s customer-related systems so they can serve clients throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Because the company’s business depends on this virtual support center (VSC) model, Arise’s service desk needs to be able to quickly solve problems agents have with their platforms and applications so they can continue, in turn, to support clients. The service desk fields from 400 to 500 support contacts per day for such issues as remote connection problems. Arise uses LogMeIn Rescue to expedite those requests and get homesourced agents back to helping clients as quickly as possible, according to Allen McClure, who manages the service desk that supports the VSC.

“Our ability to support our clients rests on ensuring that the VSC’s home-based agents can stay connected to the systems they need,” says McClure. “My team’s job is to make sure that nothing stands in the way of those agents.” His group also supports corporate employees and clients who want to access Arise’s call management systems to track call volume and agent performance, but the majority of the support requests come from home-based agents.

Virtual support center models — increasingly deployed by managed service providers — are heavily reliant on effective remote support solutions. Service desks need remote connectivity solutions so they can quickly diagnose problems and, if needed, take control of machines and fix them. When operating in a virtual model, technicians can’t physically be onsite, or lose valuable time trying to solve problems over the phone.

“It’s not as if we can walk down the hall when there’s a problem,” McClure says.

Prior to choosing LogMeIn Rescue, Arise had used another vendor’s remote connectivity tool in conjunction with phone-based support, but found the solution unsatisfactory. McClure exhaustively tested a number of tools prior to purchasing LogMeIn, but found each lacking. Shortcomings included the inability to connect to home-based agents if the VPN connection was off, the inability to handle multiple sessions, latency problems resulting in dropped connections, and the inability to support Macintosh platforms, on which many home-based agents choose to work.

“When I found Rescue it was like a breath of fresh air;” says McClure. “I’d gone through all of these different products, and they all had a ‘gotcha’ somewhere along the line.”

Arise now uses Rescue to handle about 80 percent of their support requests. “With the certification and education that Arise requires, an ACP home-based agent consistently outperforms the internal, brick-and-mortar support groups that they’re augmenting, by a factor of 10 to 30 percent,” says McClure. “Those results rest on Arise’s ability to keep the VSC’s agents connected to the systems they need. That’s where LogMeIn Rescue comes in.”

Customer Sat Goes Up, Costs Drop

LogMeIn Rescue has given Arise the kind of bottom-line results that the service provider believes translate to improved customer satisfaction, which can ultimately impact top-line revenues as well. For instance, an internal study conducted by Arise found that first-call resolution rates have increased by approximately 23 percent since implementing LogMeIn Rescue, which lowered overall costs-per-incident. McClure believes that part of that increase is attributable to Rescue’s diagnostic tools, which can quickly analyze a problem through a simple system check — an improvement over traditional phone-based support methods where agents blindly try to determine what problems exist based on customer descriptions.

Further, LogMeIn allows Arise technicians to handle multiple sessions simultaneously, increasing the volume of support contacts the service desk can process. And they’re able to reduce call volume by educating home-based agents during a support session — taking control of the desktop, showing the ACP where the problem lies, and demonstrating the troubleshooting techniques undertaken using such Rescue features as whiteboarding. The service desk also leverages Rescue’s recording feature to capture sessions so they can easily add new content to their knowledgebase.

Says McClure, “With LogMeIn Rescue, we’re able to provide a valuable educational function and decrease an individual’s support requests” — a crucial objective considering that new agents come online weekly. Arise research shows that, during September and October 2008, the service desk saw a 33 percent decrease in repeat callers.

Not surprisingly, with Arise continually ramping up new home-based agents to meet their own growth requirements, their overall support volume shows a growth pattern. Nonetheless, with their support requests increasing 268 percent since 2006, when they first started using Rescue, they’ve only had to increase support staff by 80 percent.

“With Rescue’s help in making our support staff more productive, we estimate that we’re saving $48,000 per month in support costs,” says McClure. Meanwhile, Arise internal studies show that “customer satisfaction” rates among Arise’s home-based agents have improved, McClure believes, due to the speedy problem resolution they see.

“Rescue is a breath of fresh air,” McClure adds, “and so is working with LogMeIn. All of the people we’ve worked with have been very responsive to our needs. LogMeIn provides excellent support – and at Arise we know all about excellence in support.”

About LogMeIn, Inc.

LogMeIn is a leading provider of on-demand, remote-connectivity solutions to small and medium businesses, IT service providers and consumers. LogMeIn's products are deployed on-demand and are accessible through a Web browser. The LogMeIn family includes LogMeIn Free®, LogMeIn Pro®, LogMeIn Ignition™, LogMeIn Rescue®, LogMeIn IT Reach®, LogMeIn Backup™, Remotely Anywhere®, LogMeIn Hamachi™ and LogMeIn Scout™. LogMeIn is based in Woburn, MA with European centers in Budapest, Hungary and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

More information can be found at http://www.LogMeInRescue.com.

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