Type of Work
Infrastructure Performance Consulting
Challenge
Health Dialog has call centers nationwide. Each supports a hundred or so medical professionals who use the phone to talk to people about their medical options. Health Dialog helps people determine the best next steps and, in doing so, helps health insurance companies avoid costly procedures that are not needed while increasing the patient’s individual outcomes. These medical professional rely on a highly-networked knowledge base; sharing information is critical to each processional staying up to date and giving the best possible advice.
Health Dialog had purchased high-speed networking from a national provider, but the medical processionals were experiencing poor performance at their desktops. Additionally, everyone relied on email and Health Dialog was experiencing problems caused by malware carried by email.
Solution
Allin went on site and non-destructively tested the running network. Congestion problems were found and where they were occurring was isolated. Allin then worked with the national carrier’s technical personnel, having them test the problem points and recommend solutions. Since both side wanted the problems fixed as soon as possible, rapid progress was made. The national carrier cleaned up a handful of problems spots and Health Dialog implemented some changes to minimize extra traffic over the long haul circuits.
Allin worked with Health Dialog’s personnel to stop the immediate email issues, clear up the queues, and restore service. Recommendations were made for malware detection and prevention.
Benefit
Even with a good national carrier, network problems can occur. Properly identifying the problems and being able to work directly with the national carrier’s technical personnel got to the needed fixes in the fastest possible time. Ongoing testing can identify problems as they surface from time to time and direct swift action to keep the problems from affecting over performance. Similarly, best practices in email handling can detect and eliminate malware much of the time, providing early alerts when something does happen.