GCP – How a healthcare company saved $1 million with a USB drive and ChromeOS Flex

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Jason Mesenburg, Support and Endpoint Manager for Foundations Health Solutions (FHS), an Ohio-based long-term care company managing 60 nursing homes specializing in rehabilitation and skilled nursing care. FHS deployed ChromeOS devices to reduce IT workloads and to provide clinical teams with fast and easy-to-use devices. ChromeOS Flex saved the organization almost $1 million off its budget to equip its 60 facilities with easily managed ChromeOS devices.

To ensure our clinical team can deliver the best possible care, their devices need to be fast and the interface should be user-friendly. Every minute saved on technology is a minute gained for patient interaction.

When we adopted ChromeOS Flex to modernize our aging device fleet in 60 locations around Ohio, we knew we’d get devices that are secure, boot fast, update automatically in the background, and can be managed from the cloud. But there was another major benefit: we saved almost $1 million in software, hardware, and licensing costs.

Searching for simple to manage, stable, and secure user technology

At FHS, the goals of being both exemplary caregivers and exemplary employers are intertwined. By giving employees a supportive environment and tools to excel at their jobs, we improve the care they deliver. That’s why our IT strategy is about keeping technology simple, stable, and secure.

With this strategy in mind, our plans to reduce our data center footprint were accelerating. Data centers are costly and need sysadmins to function properly. If we could move data and applications to the cloud, we’d reduce our hardware costs and find more time to focus on the caregivers’ technology needs.

A few years ago, we had about 1,000 PC laptops and desktops that had reached end of life, and we were receiving an increased amount of tickets. Instead of repairing devices, our field technicians found it easiest to reimage. This got users back up and working quickly, but we knew it was just a matter of time before the machine would stop working again. A permanent solution was needed, so we began testing Chromebooks.

Old computers made new with ChromeOS Flex

From an IT perspective, we liked the ease of management and policies you could remotely set on ChromeOS devices via the Google Admin console. Our clinical team liked using managed guest sessions, which allow multiple users to use the same device without having to login each time. We knew ChromeOS was the solution, but we didn’t want to replace all 1,000 endpoints. That’s when we heard about ChromeOS Flex. We could install ChromeOS Flex on end-of-life devices and manage them side-by-side with our existing ChromeOS fleet. That idea took off like a rocket ship because we could simultaneously update laptops and desktops that would help our team be more productive and focus more time on patients—plus we could shift data and applications to the cloud.

Our 1,100 ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex devices give our clinical team fast, secure access to electronic health records via Chrome Enterprise Recommended partner PointClickCare. Speedy logins to shared devices and automatic updates lets our team provide uninterrupted care to patients. Since Microsoft Office 365 apps now run natively on ChromeOS, we expect even more people to want to switch to ChromeOS devices. For our team working with multiple patients in a day, fast and easy access to apps is key to working efficiently and providing the best possible care.

80% reduction in hardware incidents

In IT, we know the ChromeOS laptops and desktops are easier to use because tickets are down by 80%. The only tickets we get now are for something like a dropped laptop. We no longer get questions about browser software crashing or where to find PointClickCare.

With fewer tickets, our regional field technicians, who are each assigned several facilities to manage, spend a lot less time on the road. With the Google Admin console, the IT team can make policy and admin changes centrally. We now only have one user name, instead of 60 names for each FHS building. We no longer need management of our data center. With the time we’re saving in IT, we can take care of projects that help us grow the business, not just maintain it. Time is a precious commodity, and ChromeOS has given us much of that time back.

Our focus is on empowering the clinical team. We invest strategically to provide the right tools for patient care. ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex have proven the value of cloud migration with secure, easy to manage and easy to use devices so we can keep innovating to improve patient lives.