Consulate Health Care

IT solutions from the data center to the network edge.

CLIENT CASE STUDY

ABOUT CONSULATE HEATH CARE

Consulate Health Care is a national leading provider of senior healthcare services, specializing in post-acute care. Operating more than 200 centers nationwide in 21 states, Consulate Health Care offers services ranging from short-term transitional care to Alzheimer’s and dementia care.

Since its formation as Tandem Health Care in 1997, with one center in Cheswick, PA, Consulate Health Care’s mission remains “Providing Service with Our Hearts and Hands”, which serves as the guiding principle behind everything they do. In 2006, Consulate Health Care grew to more than 75 centers in 6 states, but it was the 2012 expansion that merged more than 120 centers into the Consulate Health Care family, allowing the company to care for more residents and patients than ever before, and today, serve as one of the industry’s top employers.

Consulate Health Care services include:

• 24-hour skilled nursing care
• Comprehensive post-acute care
• Physical, occupational and speech therapies
• Discharge planning program
• Long-term care services
• Alzheimer’s and dementia care
• Care for medically-complex patients

“Consulate is investing in solutions that give our IT staff the tools they need to maintain a viable and secure network, augment the infrastructure to support telehealth applications, and make the most of our centralized management of all IT resources and assets. Greyson has helped pave that road to success.”

Mark Crandall, CIO
Consulate Health Care

GREYSON TECHNOLOGIES: “TRUST, EXPERTISE, SERVICE”

Consulate Health Care was founded on the principle of patient-centered care, and being well poised to employ the rigorous systems of care to better understand and respond to patient needs. Consulate Health Care’s IT operating plan focuses on the infrastructure required to help their caregivers achieve the most efficiency as they roll out new technologies, including a comprehensive platform for Electronic Health Records.

THE PROCESS

That’s where Greyson Technologies has become a long-term trusted partner—working with Consulate Health Care’s IT team to design, test and deploy dynamic solutions from the data center to the network edge.

Consulate Health Care engineers work continuously with Greyson to evaluate the existing data center and wide area network (WAN) architecture, and to review different platforms to address Consulate’s business criteria.

THE SOLUTION

This has resulted in Greyson architecting a new infrastructure enabling Consulate Health Care to consolidate their hardware platforms, increase data center performance, and provide higher security and greater business continuity.

The new infrastructure:

• Enables ease of management without the overhead of various tool sets, increasing the ability to grow while decreasing overall data center resources.
• Provides failover and carrier diversity including voice and security solutions powered by Cisco, which includes security hardware and features to support future SIP implementations.
• Offers data center routing continuity, where Consulate already had proper carrier redundancies, but lacked the hardware to fully support the bandwidth, routing, QOS, and automated continuity.
• Provides 24 x 7 x 365 preventive WAN monitoring and response, which was a distraction for a small staff of network engineers tasked with forward-thinking growth plans for Consulate. After working with various MNS providers and receiving less than optimal service, Consulate adopted Greyson’s MNS along with NOC services to proactively monitor and manage their WAN endpoints and corporate-wide Cisco Call Manager system.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO CONSULATE?

1. Increased application performance and improved user experience, while reducing engineering management time.
2. Improved turn-around to implement a chassis environment from one week to two days, while reducing data center environmental consumption.
3. Changed responses to WAN node outages from reactive to proactive with Greyson’s MNS, while increasing the viability of the network and reducing the workload on the network engineering staff.
4. Created uniformity to Consulate’s network, while stabilizing WAN communications and continuity.