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Mercy Health System
Mercy Health System of Maine prides itself on comprehensive and compassionate treatment of patients through its renowned combination of a caring, highly skilled staff and state-of-the-art medical technology. This commitment to excellence reaches across its departments and operations. So when Mercy’s IT staff was ready to upgrade a key piece of the hospital’s IT infrastructure, they called on Norton Lamb & Company for help.
“The operating system that managed our payroll, time and attendance records and our historical clinical and financial data was getting older, and the costs to maintain it were quite high,” explains John McGettigan, a Senior Systems Analyst at Mercy. “We approached the team at Norton Lamb & Company about upgrading the software, and they came back to us with a solution that included upgrading the entire system, both hardware and software, at a price that offered a payback of less than two years.”
Ron Shink, President of Norton Lamb & Company, expands, “Mercy was faced with the challenge of replacing a piece of older but important IT infrastructure that had specialized functionality associated with it. Norton Lamb & Company was able to respond with a turnkey solution that included designing an appropriate upgrade path, securing the necessary new equipment, and minimizing the impacts of implementation scheduling and system conversion.”
NLC was able to work out a detailed pre-installation conversion and integration plan that allowed Mercy to continue working right up through to the actual system cutover and then to experience little impact upon conversion.
“The transition went very smoothly,” continues John McGettigan, “Joe Hodge from NLC was responsive and accommodating to our schedule. He and his team developed an efficient plan to install the new system, test it, and make it live. A bonus feature is the size of the new system. Our old system occupied over 30 square feet of floor space and was expensive to power and cool. With this conversion we have not only dramatically reduced our maintenance costs, but because the new system is about one-twentieth the size of its predecessor and fits in a standard rack, it’s much more energy efficient as well.”
Ron Shink concludes, “We believe that a well planned and managed project should translate into savings and confidence for our customers. Irrespective of the type of business or organization, that is always our goal.”