Lerner Eye Center
The Company
The Lerner Eye Center provides state-of-the-art ophthalmologist services such as Lasik, Laser Vision Correction, Conductive Karatoplasty and Crystalens. Located in the East Bay, with offices in San Ramon, Concord and Pittsburg, Dr. Hillary Lerner and his staff manage a very busy patient schedule.
Business Challenge
For over two years, Dr. Lerner and his staff at Lerner Eye Center were frustrated by ongoing problems with their network infrastructure. Multiple times per day, the Pittsburg and San Ramon offices would experience drops in network connectivity in addition to the practice management application crashing. The staff had very limited options for dealing with these issues - remediation often consisted of rebooting all of the remote site computers and sometimes the server itself in order to reestablish connectivity. The reliability issues were causing 24+ hours of lost employee productivity per week and lost revenue when new clients could not book an appointment while the application was down.
Technology Solution
Vital Signs Technology architected a solution that improved the network reliability and application performance while being sensitive to the financial impact to Lerner Eye Center’s bottom line.
Taking an iterative approach and working from the edge of the network, Vital Signs Technology stabilized the network and the interoffice connectivity by replacing Lerner’s existing VPN gateways with Juniper Networks Netscreen Firewalls. This allowed routing and firewall functions to shift from the server, to a purpose built appliance. This solution established reliable and secure method to connect the remote offices to the main site. With the network stabilized, Vital Signs Technology turned its focus to the dated terminal server. Vital Signs Technology took a better suited server out of their loaner pool to serve as the Terminal Server hosting the practice management software. With the network, Terminal Server and application access now stable, Vital Signs Technology partnered with Dell to deliver Lerner Eye Center new terminal server that met their long-term needs.
Results and Benefits
The network infrastructure stabilized after careful planning and Lerner Eye Center’s interoffice connectivity remains stable and reliable with a greater than 99.99% uptime. Server reliability and performance has also seen a substantial improvement. Presently, the server is restarted only to apply security updates and maintains an uptime of greater than 99.9 %. Overall security with the firewall, office connectivity and server environment has improved and that results in less risk to the business.
Finally, Lerner Eye Center’s ability to book and service patients improved and they regained the lost hours of employee time wasted while systems rebooted, an estimated 6 hours per employee per week.