Case Study: Amedisys

Today we’re joined by Ed Lewis, manager of enterprise solutions at Amedisys. Thanks for your time, Ed. So, tell me a little bit about Amedisys to start.

Here at Amedisys, the two legs of our business are in hospice and home health care. We help people primarily by working with hospitals and health organizations to get patients the care they need from the comfort of their home. That was they don’t have to go into the hospital for checkups or take up a bed that could be used for someone with an immediate concern that needs the skill of a doctor and the hospital equipment to handle it.

We are in 39 states currently and have between 24-26,000 employees, with about half of those employees being clinicians.

That’s certainly a large digital footprint to cover. Could you give me an idea of what you and your team are focused on?

I am the manager of enterprise solutions. My team is responsible for all the enterprise solutions and services throughout the organization. So we handle computer storage, networking, automations, client engineering operations, anything around that touches the masses.

Let’s talk about the support situation that you guys had been using previously. Give me an idea where you were with Microsoft, where were you with the OEM directly through either premier or unified, and what was the experience like for you?

We had premier support originally. You know, we had our own TAM through Microsoft.
The support model is terrible. It was terrible for what you pay for. We simply weren’t getting what we paid for. And then every year or every time we had to true up, the cost keeps climbing and climbing. A lot of the frustration that we had was when you put a request in, there’s a lot of round-robin.

There’s a lot of red tape. A poor job of triage, playing and e-mail catch up game when you finally got to someone that could answer your question, support staff in a different time zone so you can’t properly communicate with them. So many issues for such a high cost. Your TAM couldn’t even help that much, they could only escalate it within Microsoft and maybe get it in front of someone that could help, but the odds of getting a good engineer were slim.

It’s interesting, you mentioned both escalating prices and the support experience and the engineering transfers and pass offs from team to team. What was the bigger issue for you guys? Was the poor support or the high costs that drove you to a different solution?

They run hand in hand, but I will say the poor customer service was what got us to start looking. It’s a big deal. The customer may not always be right, but you should be putting your customer first when it comes to providing a service. With Microsoft Support having such poor customer service, it makes you wonder what you’re paying for. We looked for alternatives that offered greater value for better service around when it was time to renew and found US Cloud.

Another interesting thing you mentioned was the time zone differences. When you were getting support from Microsoft previously, were there any concerns around logs being sent elsewhere?

While that wasn’t really a concern, sometimes it’s very hard to work with some of the contractors just because of either language barrier or time zone barrier, or even a support knowledge barrier, like they don’t have enough knowledge to help with our issue. When you need support, you don’t want to worry about overcoming each of these barriers, especially when you have a priority ticket that needs a quick resolution.

Last question for you. Have there been any specific tickets or instances that stand out to you while working with US Cloud? How would you rate our services?

Microsoft deployed a patch that we deployed to our server environment. This patch caused us to have issues with devices connected to the network. We contacted Microsoft Support and US Cloud at the same time since this was affecting us on a national scale. We weren’t sure if it was an Intune problem or if it was network related. The US Cloud team immediately got back to us, which is one of the best things about your services. The support engineer said that they had received reports of similar issues already and they had been working on a fix. It was reassuring to know that we weren’t alone with this problem. After a few hours of testing your team was able to help us deploy a follow-up patch that fixed the issue.

It’s amazing how fast you guys respond. Sometimes we submit tickets that aren’t even incident related, we just have a question that we want to talk through with someone and your team is always there to offer advice and help right away.

We, we leverage you guys, not just for when something’s on fire. We truly see US Cloud as a partner.

That’s great to hear, thank you very much. I think that’s the perfect place for us to end. Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.

Great. Good deal. Thanks guys.