Colorado Community Managed Care Networks (CCMCN)

Customer Success Story Colorado Community Managed Care Networks (CCMCN) CCMCN Reduces Overhead and Speeds Performance

of 5 CCMCN Reduces Overhead and Speeds Performance Table of Contents Page 2 The Challenge Page 3 The Solution Page 4 The Results Comprising 15 community health centers with more than 90 clinic sites including school-based clinics, pharmacies, and mobile units nonprofit Colorado Community Managed Care Network s (CCMCN) mission is to proactively respond to Medicaid managed care. The Denver-based organization focuses on managed and accountable care, health information technology, and clinical quality improvement programming. CCMCN has been working with health information technology for 10 years, riding the meaningful use and healthcare IT wave, particularly for the safety net of Medicaid and underinsured patients who can t afford health insurance on their own. The Challenge From its founding in 1994, CCMCN had owned and managed all of its own infrastructure. Weary of the high costs and overhead involved in that, CCMCN wanted to outsource as much of its servers and infrastructure as possible. The organization had been using a local data center provider for co-location services and had reached a point where it no longer wanted to be a group of IT experts responsible for that aspect of the business. The company s four-year-old existing hardware was becoming outdated and in need of replacement. When you re buying hardware for the next three years, it s difficult to be able to know how much you re going to need and to size it, explains Jason Greer, executive director of CCMCN. He and his team thought it would be easier to buy cloud-based resources. We re moving from owning and managing all of our software to outsourcing as much as we possibly can so we don t have depreciating infrastructure on our books, he adds. The organization wanted to get out of the IT side of business to be able to concentrate on helping people.

of 5 The Solution When looking for a cloud provider, CCMCN wanted a company with a proven data center and large customer base, preferably healthcare-centric, with expertise in HIPAA security and positive references from people with experience with the company. A lot of infrastructure vendors are putting together cloud-based platforms without a large user base, Greer says. That seems risky. After evaluating offerings from Microsoft, Amazon, and a few other local vendors, Greer notes that they didn t seem as robust. All seemed OK, but they didn t know enough about healthcare or HIPAA. With Microsoft s offering, for example, it felt like he d be buying a utility without a lot of people to support it. ClearDATA proposed three virtual, cloud-hosted servers with a combined total of 3.1TB of storage space. ClearDATA came with people and expertise, Greer says. Meeting all of CCMCN s criteria, ClearDATA came highly recommended from people who had experience using it, Greer notes. The engineers understood what we were talking about. On top of that, CCMCN was able to purchase a small portion of infrastructure as a starting point to try the product out and could add more as it wanted or as the need arose. ClearDATA s exclusive healthcare focus and deep experience in healthcare cloud hosting were also key factors in CCMCN s decision. The organization went from using 50 virtual servers to three. We only need a small handful to get the core pieces of our infrastructure off the ground, Greer explains. Ancillary pieces are added as we go and can be added on the fly. I don t have to guess what my needs are going to be next year; I can just tell ClearDATA what my needs are now, and we can adjust as we go.

of 5 The Results CCMCN has realized improved system performance twice as fast as before as a result of transitioning to a cloud-based infrastructure. The performance of the database when it runs on a single server is a lot faster in this environment than in our previous one, Greer says. Moving to ClearDATA also reduced CCMCN s spending budget. We went from 40 line items in our budget to a single line item through ClearDATA with a significant cost savings, Greer notes. We don t have to try to overbuild for what the capacity might be in the future. I can just use what I need. Partnering with ClearDATA engineers is a plus. With ClearDATA, we have intelligent, well-trained engineers on our side that can definitely meet us in the middle, he adds. The engineers have been very good at understanding our requests. They help us decide what to add now or later. The engineering team continually evaluates the environment alongside CCMCN, helping the organization determine best practices for performing tasks and when. Every step of the way, we have a conversation about best practices. The engineers tell us the limitations from the security side, Greer explains. It allows us to feel confident that whatever we re doing is going to be covered by HIPAA. But one of the biggest saves for the organization is the elimination of overhead. Not having to manage the disk drives, fans, switches, all the hardware, maintenance, and Internet connections, and just paying a single monthly bill and not having to hire all the IT people to run everything that s a big win for us, Greer sums.

About Us ClearDATA is the nation s fastest growing healthcare cloud computing company. More than 310,000 healthcare professionals rely on ClearDATA s HIPAA compliant cloud computing HealthDATA platform and infrastructure to store, manage, protect and share their patient data and critical applications. For more information 1600 W. Broadway Road, Tempe AZ (800) 804-6052 www.cleardata.com