Tremendous growth calls for reliable IT solutions

Growth and expansion have been the constant story for CHAS Health over the past 25 years. In 1994, CHAS Health began as a single clinic with two exam rooms in Spokane, WA, created to serve patients who did not have health insurance. It has grown to an 18-location non-profit organization spanning Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho. Today, CHAS Health provides medical, dental, pharmacy, and behavioral health services to nearly 100,000 patients throughout Spokane County and the Lewis-Clark Valley every year. This kind of growth comes with challenges, and the CHAS Health IT team knows this firsthand.

“Without SmartDeploy, you would need to disable the encryption, update all the drivers, and then make sure it’s all reenabled. You’d do that all manually. But SmartDeploy just does it on its own."

— Eddie Tuell, systems engineer at CHAS Health

Too many drivers, not enough time

CHAS Health’s desktop support team manages all the organization’s PCs for providers, administrative staff, and more. The team is constantly searching for ways to more efficiently deploy and manage computers as the organization consistently adds new clinics and exam rooms.

As with most organizations, rapid expansion led to growing pains within the IT department, as old processes could no longer support the larger set of end users. For example, the IT department had to manually download drivers for more than 20 Dell computer models. Managing and updating the device drivers required valuable IT time and ultimately led to “multiple blue screen problems,” explains Eddie Tuell, system engineer for CHAS Health. He set out to find a better driver management strategy that would eliminate the driver headaches, improve endpoint reliability, and increase the team’s productivity. He began researching desktop management solutions on online forums and found SmartDeploy.

Tuell signed up for a SmartDeploy trial. “We deployed a Windows image to 15 computers without any issues,” he says. “The blue screen issues were long gone thanks to the Platform Packs that the driver experts at SmartDeploy update and test.” With the driver legwork handled, Tuell and his team were ready to move forward with purchasing SmartDeploy. The value of SmartDeploy compared to its annual cost made the justification of a purchase make sense.

Security through bitlocker automation

To protect data, CHAS Health enables BitLocker on all endpoints – a step they’ve configured SmartDeploy to handle automatically as part of reimaging. When pushing driver updates, Tuell explains that “without SmartDeploy, you would need to disable the encryption, update all the drivers, and then make sure it’s all reenabled. You’d do that manually. But SmartDeploy just does it on its own.” Although this is a minor feature, it eliminates the chance of human error that could ultimately save the organization from a security breach.

Rapid growth coupled with the challenge of meeting HIPAA requirements and protecting patient records require the CHAS Health IT department to carefully select solutions that are secure and reliable. SmartDeploy has not only met but exceeded CHAS Health’s expectations for a computer management solution that it uses daily.