The benefits of a cloud-based solution with Jonathan Prak, Director of IT Services, and Robert Supper, CFO, Waverly Heights

In this episode of the Post-Acute POV, our host Eric Grunden, Chief Customer Officer, is joined by Jonathan Prak, Director of IT Services, and Robert Supper CPA, MBA, NHA, CFO, Waverly Heights. The trio discusses the benefits of transitioning to a cloud-based solution from an on-premise server.

Join Eric, Jonathan, and Robert as they discuss how a cloud-based solution has helped Waverly Heights, the simple migration process, how their IT staff’s work has evolved since migration, and how you can leverage future LPC Cloud capabilities. Listen to their discussion.

Topics discussed during today’s episode:

1. [00:36 – 03:44]: Eric introduces the topic before Bob and Jonathan provide a brief look into their background and their roles at Waverly Heights.
2. [04:25 – 07:33]: Bob and Jonathan describe how they define a cloud-based solution and what they saw as the most significant benefits that impacted their decision to migrate.
3. [07:58 – 11:10]: Bob details the issues they were looking to solve by moving to a cloud-based solution from a business perspective while Jonathan provides insight from his technical IT perspective.
4. [11:30 – 15:12]: Bob gives an inside look at the financial benefits that Waverly Heights has achieved since moving to the cloud. Jonathan shares how their IT staff’s work has evolved since the transition.
5. [15:34 – 20:39]: Jonathan shares helpful details on what organizations should expect when migrating to the cloud regarding the timeline, interacting with the MatrixCare team, and how much extra work will be involved.
6. [20:57 – 24:07]: Bob explains how his team feels the transition was executed: whether the staff was happy, what benefits they’ve seen, and more.
7. [24:27 – 26:23]: Bob and Jonathan encourage those on the fence about migrating to a cloud-based solution to go for it. They’ve found the benefits worthwhile and are pleased with the successful transition.

Resources

• Find out more about Waverly Heights: https://www.waverlyheightsltd.org/
• Listen to more episodes of the Post-Acute POV

Transcript

Speaker 1

Hi, and welcome to the Post-Acute Point of View, our discussion hub for healthcare technology in the out of hospital space. Here we talk about the latest news and views on trends and innovation that can impact the way Post-Acute care providers work. And we take a look at how technology can make a difference in today’s changing healthcare landscape in both home based and facility based care organizations, and the lives of the people they serve. Today we hear from Eric Grunden, Chief Customer Officer, and his special guest. Let’s dive in.

Eric Grunden

Well, good afternoon, and thank you for joining the [inaudible 00:00:39] care team, and one of our customers for hopefully a great conversation around the transition to the cloud, LPC, all things that kind of relate to that. We look forward to sharing a little bit with you, but again, appreciate each and every one of you taking time away from what you’re doing, your businesses, your residence, and joining us for a conversation that you’ll get quite a bit out of. I am very pleased and honored. We have a customer that has made this transition. Join us today for this conversation team from Waverly Heights, and I’ll let them introduce themselves, but super excited to have Bob and Jonathan join us. So, Bob, you’ll just take a couple of minutes, introduce yourself, a little bit about Waverly Heights, and then Jonathan we’ll pass it to you to do the same.

Bob Supper

Sure. Great. Thanks Eric. I got the super excited pun, because my last name’s Supper, but I’m Bob Supper at Waverly Heights. I’m the CFO. And Waverly, just real quickly, we were founded back in 1986. We’re located in the Philadelphia suburban market area, which is one of the most densely populated market areas in the country. We’re in an upscale market so we have high end clientele living here. We’re at A minus positive Fitch rating. [inaudible 00:01:48] accredited, we’re on 63 acres. We have 220 units, 150 apartments, 70 are villas on the independent side. And we’ve got about a hundred healthcare units. It’s about a $45 million a year budget, and we own a private duty companion company that has about 11 million of that revenue. So I’ll turn it over to Jonathan.

Jonathan Prak

Sure. Hi, my name is Jonathan Prak. I am the Director of IT Service here at Waverly Heights. I’ve been here 15 years. The same time we actually went with MatrixCare LPC when it was known as Advanced Answers on Demand. So I work my way from being a co-op started, and recently become director for about five years now.

Bob Supper

And I’ll just add that I’ve been in the senior living LPC industry at basically three companies for 38 years now in various roles and operations in finance, and been a happy MatrixCare customer for over 25 years. I guess, try to describe them as saying that the hole is better than the sum of its parts. I think we’re committed to having a system where we used most of MatrixCare’s applications. Maybe each individual application may not be the best, but you can assure that they’re working to improve it. That kind of fit for our strategy here for how we moved into the cloud. But in whole, we’re very happy with MatrixCare.

Eric Grunden

Well thank you for that, Bob. And I appreciate both you and Jonathan taking some time this afternoon. My name is Eric Grunden. I’m the Chief Customer Officer here at MatrixCare. I know many of you that are joining us today are on the fence a little bit about this transition, of moving from an on prem, a server, solution into the cloud, and really want you to hear from Waverly Heights about the transition and the experience that they had both leading up to, and then of course the transition, and then coming out of that transition, where they are now. And I’ve had a chance to spend some time with both Bob and Patrick. They’ve got a great story.

Eric Grunden

And I think what you’ll find today is a very thoughtful process that they took, and the reasons behind it. So with that, let’s jump in. And I’m just going to throw these questions out. Bob, you and Jonathan take turns going back and forth, and we’ll fill in where need be. But the term cloud is kicked around a lot. You hear it on the TV, you hear it in the industry, private cloud, public cloud, and if you’re not familiar, if you’re not in IT, if you’re not doing this for a living, it could seem a little overwhelming in what that truly means. First, start by giving me your definition. When you think cloud, when you’re starting to take this seriously, what were you thinking about, in your own words, about the cloud. Bob, we’ll start with you.

Bob Supper

Yeah, I guess it was a group of servers that we would basically store information that would be much more secure and safe and prevent us from adding servers like we have over the years as our data requirements have moved up.

Eric Grunden

Awesome. Jonathan, anything to add from your standpoint?

Jonathan Prak

Yeah. Well, I’ve always stayed in touch with technology, pretty much [inaudible 00:04:49] of it, trying to make sure that I’m up to date. I’ve known cloud pretty well. I went to the seminar with MatrixCare when they started introducing clouds, and I have known for a pretty good amount and the definition of it. But for me, it is something that we kind of want to make sure that MatrixCare’s clouds are ready for us. That’s the reason why we’re waiting to see. But cloud definition for us is pretty much the same thing Bob was saying, just kind of a farm of servers that pool all kinds of resources that are available for the software application that MatrixCare uses, the Pervasive PSQL, to kind of load all that information onto [inaudible 00:05:26] able to provide all those resources instead of us going out there to buy the hardware that match the performance that’s required for the application.

Eric Grunden

Absolutely. And from my standpoint, I have this conversation a lot with customers, when you say the words on premise, you’re talking about that hardware, those servers being in your office, and then the maintenance of that. And of course, natural disasters and all of those things that you have to worry about versus the cloud being a managed solution provides that security and such. So Jonathan, staying with you, when you think about when you were starting to weigh the benefits versus the cons of moving from an on premise solution where you’ve got your hands on it and you see it every day into the cloud, where you mentioned it, is the matrix cloud actually ready? What did you see as the biggest benefits of moving towards that?

Jonathan Prak

Well, for us right now, the biggest benefit that we’ve seen is less downtime. We do have to do a lot of upgrade. When there’s an upgrade that we have to have our IT staff to actually stay at midnight or later because we are a 24 7 service, so we want to make sure that it’s up. But with cloud solution, you kind of have all of that ready. And the upgrade seem seamless because once the upgrade is done, you have multiple servers that you can run while doing the upgrade. And then once that’s done, you kind of switch over and just copy the data over. This is all behind the scenes, no one else is going to see it, but it’s a lot better than us, as an IT, to kind of shut down the server because we have only one server instead of having, like I said before, a pool of servers where you can jump from different locations to another without interrupting the client to use the resources.

Eric Grunden

Great. Bob, anything to add there from your standpoint?

Bob Supper

Just from the financial perspective, the less time that the IT team here can spend on routine tasks, the better off we are to focus on key initiatives like IT security, which is a key focus for us. And then not having to buy servers repeatedly is a big plus for us. I guess I look financially at the win-win side of conversion, having gone through it in November of last year.

Eric Grunden

Great points from both the technical and the financial side. As you started down this, I’m interested in, of course we sent out a lot of messaging and we were talking about MatrixCare’s cloud, and we were still encouraging our customers to make that transition for a lot of reasons. Were there specific problems, either from a business standpoint or from an IT standpoint, that you were trying to solve around the consideration of moving the cloud. Bob, let’s start with you on the business side.

Bob Supper

Well, I guess as Jonathan said, we’re a little conservative moving into the process. It’d been out for a couple years. And I think from a business perspective, we knew the benefits that we just discussed, kind of been seeing those benefits live for a number of months now. But it’s basically worked out well for us. And business wise, we’re always trying to be as efficient as we can. And I think this is a tool that makes us much more efficient from an IT standpoint.

Jonathan Prak

Yeah. For me specifically, the reason why we didn’t jump into cloud right away, first, we don’t want to be the beta of what’s going on. Going up there, of course, everybody doesn’t want to be the beta, but now that you’ve been doing it very efficiently, and I saw the transaction that we’ve been transitioned to you guys last year was really great seeing that you’ve done your due diligence to kind of mitigate all the downtime and data migration and all that.

Jonathan Prak

So after I’ve seen all that, we realized, okay, this is a great opportunity for us to go again. I also look at it financially sometimes that it is a great thing that if we are going, we are going to be saving on IT staff times and also the downtime that we can mitigate doing this upgrade. And also sometimes we have to do this, MatrixCare calls it the enhancements process, that we kind of do it every quarter, where we have to kind of [inaudible 00:09:22] all the memory that we use on premises. And then that takes a lot of hours. And that’s a lot of downtime, for not only for just IT staff, but also for all clinical staff. As a whole, they have to kind of go on paper at least go in for one hour or two hours to kind of save the memory for the server to work on applications. So that is something.

Eric Grunden

That’s a great point. Those are great points. And again, I don’t think MatrixCare alone when you’re talking about solutions that you move to the cloud, the impact of having them in your office versus in the cloud. On that note, a little bit of a wildcard question for you hear Jonathan, are there other applications that you’ve either recently moved into the cloud after experience with moving the LPC solution, or that you’re considering moving to the cloud that you use in your facilities?

Jonathan Prak

Yeah, currently we actually have Office 365. That is in the cloud. We are planning to move our active directory to the cloud as well. We might continue to do a hybrid. Of course there’s always a pros and cons to do either one of them. So we want to do a hybrid because we want to make the transition as smoothly as possible. Again, to me, giving the employees, the staff, to work without interruption is the goal because when you have interruption to a business that costs a lot of money.

Jonathan Prak

So for us, as an IT, we have to find that solution, go into the clouds. We just have to make sure our internet connection, ISP, is all duplicated and redundant and backed up. So make sure all that is done from your end to make sure that you have a pure, good connection to provide the resources and connection from the other end. MatrixCare, of course, would have unlimited connection and the speed will be phenomenal, but if you are on premises, internet connection is not as fast and is slow, you’re not going to get full potential that you can be benefiting from going to the cloud.

Eric Grunden

Exactly. Yes. Good. Very good points. Bob, back to you. You alluded to your main focuses and reasons of doing this was from a financial standpoint, and I’m not asking you to open the books and share your screen on the details here, but are there things that you can allude to, or some high level experiences that you can share with what kind of financial impact that this move had for you?

Bob Supper

Yeah. We probably estimate that we save about 25, $30,000 a year in potential purchases of servers, based on our recent history. And then IT staff, I think Jonathan and I estimated we might save 15 to 20 hours a month, which basically adds up to a couple hundred hours a year of their time, which you could put a price on that based on how you price it out. But there’s definitely been economies of scale and the change that we’ve made.

Eric Grunden

That’s impressive. That’s good to see that kind of in detail is tremendous. I guess this question could be for both of you. I’ll stay with you, Bob. Were there concerns the night before you made the decision to make this move? Are you still kind of weighing should we do it because it’s the right time? What were the main concerns about actually making the final decision to make the move to the cloud?

Bob Supper

Yeah, we had budgeted for two years before we actually did it. And I guess my concern at the high level, because I’m not a technical IT guru like Jonathan and his team, was the impact that it could have on all the users, and the potential issues that could arise. I can’t say that from a technical standpoint, but you kind of get in the groove with business and you’re moving right along, and you can say, well, gee, this isn’t really that big of a priority. But it’s something we realized over time that we definitely needed to do. So I was real concerned about how the conversion would go, which without jumping ahead too far, and any questions you might have was actually seamless and smooth as could be. And I know Jonathan could talk about that as well.

Bob Supper

But I’m sure we would’ve heard, and I would’ve heard as the CFO, if we had problems with users and different operating systems on the clinical side that we use and the financial side, we can’t close the books and a lot of information that we generate and rely on, that system breaks down because we’re converting to the cloud then we were a little bit uneasy about the potential for that. Thank God the potential never came to fruition because it went really well.

Eric Grunden

Good. Thank you. Jonathan, anything from your standpoint, from the IT standpoint, what kept you up the night before, or during the process? Or what kept you from going earlier?

Jonathan Prak

Yes, absolutely. We didn’t want to go earlier, again, like I said, we didn’t want to be the beta, but from the IT perspective, we just want to make sure we check all the lists from a security standpoint. HIPAA compliant, is it encrypted, password protected, how security is to lock in and all that? But after talking with your team, who I can also kind of give them applause for it because they’ve done a really good job communicating with me, and kind of make sure and ensuring that the transition will be smooth as possible. I just very much go through [inaudible 00:14:29] with them, pretty much make sure the [inaudible 00:14:32] because we pretty much have everything with MatrixCare, point of sales, financials, clinical. So all that is very important to us. Again, downtime is not something that I would want to face for two, three hours. If you’re telling me, oh yeah, it’s going to take six hours.

Jonathan Prak

I’ll be like, nope. Whenever you’re ready to give me a better transition, then I will move to you. And that’s when you ensure me that it’s going to be a better transition. And it happened. It was a good, smooth transition that we had done when we moved to. We checked all the lists, make sure the printers are ready, make sure the icons on the desktop for the users will be the same. I think with all that ensured me to be ready. We are ready to go [inaudible 00:15:12]

Eric Grunde

Wonderful. Wonderful. And thank you. Then let’s stay on that theme. Let’s talk a little bit more in detail about that transition process. Jonathan, from your standpoint, give the folks that have not yet gone through this process, what should they expect from a timeline standpoint, the interaction with the MatrixCare team, how much extra work are they going to see for a period of time as they start to make this transition?

Jonathan Prak

Sure. From the IT perspective, we did our legwork before the transition. Pretty much make sure we communicate with the IT team. But I’m really glad because I think the MatrixCare IT team’s really done a phenomenal job communicating, and responding to the [inaudible 00:15:49]. That was the most concerning because I don’t want to ask a question when I have doubt and never got any response, but you guys have done a great job responding to all the questions, and that makes me feel more confident going with you guys to the cloud. Also again, we did our kind of checklist, make sure all the printers are ready before we go into the cloud. We test it out first. We make a kind of sandbox that we test it out on our environment, installing a system of our system, from POS from the clinical point of view, from the point of sales, point of care, we install all that system on our IT rooms and test it all out and make sure everything looks smooth and all that.

Jonathan Prak

And do as much backup as possible so that the transition will shorten the time, because MatrixCare will tell you it will take four to six hours. I don’t know you how many hours now you guys are telling people, but it was a lot faster for us than expected. But again, we want to ensure the communication with whatever team that’s going to be on that. If you have clinical teams that you’re working with, make sure you communicate with them and make sure that they know this is happening. But I think another thing that makes it a smooth transition is that all our IT staff was here on site to make sure, to talk with the CNA to ensure that it will be coming back up. And once it’s up, we ensure that it all goes as smoothly as possible, and we stay behind to make sure everything else is done right.

Eric Grunden

Wonderful. Wonderful. Bob, anything to add from your standpoint? I know you probably have to get your hands dirty on the IT side, but there were probably things that you had to prepare for as well.

Bob Supper

No, I was kept abreast of what was going on, but I wasn’t here overnight like Jonathan and the team were, I was fully supporting you, but anyway, but we did well. And I don’t think we were down, how many hours would you estimate? I’m trying to remember, Jonathan if we were even down, not long.

Jonathan Prak

I would say max was about two hours, at least to get all the icons on every workstation because we have to push it out to do all that. So you have to have your team is capable of pushing out all the software insulation for the Matrix cloud icons on there. And also beforehand we communicated and make sure letting all the staff know this is what the icon’s going to look like, if it is going to change, if it is different from what you have right now, because the remote desktop looked a little bit different. And the expectation, how long are they going to have to wait for this, especially with first initial. And then just make sure that you communicate and let them know that, hey, if there’s any problem, reach out to us immediately. And I stayed after the transition a couple days later, but I think most important is the communication again with your team after it happened, because you do have some other stuff that happened.

Jonathan Prak

For instance, some of the database that’s not running right, for instance FNI, we still use FNI, but I know you guys have enterprise analytic ready, but we still use that for sites where we have to kind of configure all that. And also any third software company like rehabs or pharmacies interface and all that, just make sure that’s all done behind the scenes with your IT team and with your on premises team to make sure that is working as well. Again, important to test it out before you actually go live with it.

Eric Grunden

Yeah. Great advice. Great advice. One of the questions that I get a lot is I start to talk to customers that are still having a little bit of caution and thinking about this transition LPC is how is the life of my IT staff going to change? Am I still going to need them? Are they going to be asked to do things that they’re not ready to do? Or maybe am I going to have to get different staff? So Jonathan, involving you as well, how has the team’s responsibility changed now that there is not physical hardware in your office and everything is in the cloud?

Jonathan Prak

To me, we have a lot of other applications as well, not just MatrixCare’s. For us going to the cloud doesn’t mean it’s the end of IT. You don’t need a person to be here at all. They still need us because there’s time that they couldn’t access MatrixCare, either because again, you have all your networking done in house where it is important to keep that up and running 24 7 now. You’re relying on that. Now your IT team will be focused to make sure you have a 24 7 connection to it, and the speed that’s required to process every application, requesting data from MatrixCare. Now all the servers can handle everything because now it’s in the cloud. A pool of servers can do all the calculation and everything for you, but if you don’t have the connection, the capability.

Jonathan Prak

Let’s say you have a hundred workstations or something more than that, you need to be able to access all that because now everything is going out instead of locally. A lot of times you never have to need 500 gigabyte or one gigabyte or two gigabyte [inaudible 00:20:25] connection. But now you have to run into that. Some location only have, what, a hundred megabyte or 500 megabyte, we need more bandwidth to handle all this connectivity that’s going on in daily activity of daily work.

Eric Grunden

Wonderful. What’s the staff’s reaction been? Do they know that this has happened? Have they seen any kind of change in any way, shape or form? I know you had to let them know you were going to be down for a couple hours. Have they had any comments? Have there been any concerns? Either way, both positive or negative, we’re here for it all. So if there’s been some issues, let us know about those as well.

Bob Supper

I think the word I would use is transparent because we worked up front with MatrixCare team and our IT team because of the communication we put out in advance, because of the fact that the guys were there overnight to hold hands with some people who may get more nervous about changes like this. It worked out very well. I never heard many complaints or many comments from anyone. I mean the finance team are power users too, and everything went real smooth from that perspective because of course I was here first morning when we were converted to the cloud. But everything seemed to almost be too good to be true, from my perspective at least.

Jonathan Prak

Yeah. From the IT perspective, there weren’t a lot. I think again, I think we did the legwork with the MatrixCare team to kind of ensure everything looked the same. There’s not much change. Now, I think one of the things that a little bit different too, we actually had gone with terminal service with MatrixCare before we went to the cloud. So a lot of that is very familiar to our employees as well. So they already know that we’ve been using terminal servers to connect, and remote desktop to the cloud had been almost the same to them. The only caveat and a little bit different is point of sales because the printers, the mapping, takes some time to start up through MatrixCare, that size. And now they kind of go over that huddle and are kind of like, you know what? It is what it is. When it’s done, it’s loaded, it worked perfectly. So that’s fine for us.

Eric Grunden

Awesome. A couple final questions here with Bob, Jonathan, either one. Start with you, Bob. As you’ve moved from having a server and the hardware in your facility now to the cloud, have you had to rethink anything operational, changes that you’ve made inside of the organization? Bob, we’ll start with you, and then Jonathan, I’m sure you’ve had to have some of those as well.

Bob Supper

Well, from my perspective there hasn’t been too many operational changes. I guess I like the fact that the guys don’t have to do as many quarterly updates being here at night to do that type of operation. But for the most part, again, it’s been fairly transparent from my perspective.

Eric Grunden

Good. Jonathan, anything operationally you guys have changed on the IT side?

Jonathan Prak

I think operation wise, I mean we’re kind of no longer having to worry about doing midnight, spending hours upgrading and all that. So we use that time to sleep better. But besides that, from the daily basis, now that it’s gone to the cloud, we have support for MatrixCare all the time. We use that time to focus on different projects that we have going around on campus because MatrixCare, of course, is a big application, a critical application for us. But we have other tasks in hand that we have to complete with many things. Make sure you keep up with compliance, make sure your campus is improving and meeting the resident needs on a different other level. And that’s what we focus on right now. So it’s great that we can take one off on our plate and kind of move on to something else that can improve the campus, and the company as a whole.

Eric Grunden

Awesome. Well again, we appreciate your candor, and sharing your experience with us. Last question. If you had to give one, maybe two pieces of advice that you felt were most important, either things that you did that made your transition smooth, or things you wish you would’ve done to make it just a little smoother. Bob, we’ll start with you. One or two big pieces of advice for the group out there.

Bob Supper

Just, I would advise people that if you’re thinking about it, go for it. I would say it turned out to be very efficient and economic from our perspective. Another thing I didn’t mention that I liked a lot, which used to drive me crazy, I think we had 27 amendments and they all came up at different times from the billing perspective, or an administrative perspective. So we’re able to work with MatrixCare to the point now where we just get quarterly bills and everything’s on the same time cycle. It smooths out the financial layout of cash over the course of the year, each quarter. And that worked out fairly well. And there were a couple apps that really didn’t cost us any more at all. And there were a couple apps that had been thrown in, like the enterprise analytics that we had. We were on a [inaudible 00:25:13] yesterday, trying to learn more about that and use that too as well. So I would just encourage everyone to move ahead. Plan in advance like we did, but move ahead and you won’t regret it.

Eric Grunden

Awesome. Awesome. Jonathan, from your standpoint?

Jonathan Prak

Again, just pretty much be prepared. Have your IT staff ready. Communication, communication, it’s a key point to kind of ease everybody’s expectation. Don’t want them to go, oh no, I can’t do this. This is something big is going on. No, you definitely can go move forward with it. If you are thinking about them going to the cloud, I think you can do it. Just be prepared to make sure your tests have the same environment. And the MatrixCare team will definitely guide you through all that. So you can communicate. They’ve done a very good job communicating with me anytime there’s an issue, right away jump on it and we work on the solution together and that’s how they kind of ease us with the migration.

Eric Grunden

Awesome. Awesome. Well thank you both, and appreciate your feedback. So with that, Bob, Jonathan, thank you so much for your time. More than anything, appreciate your partnership and sharing your experience. Thank you for spending time with us today. Thank you so much. You guys have a great day.

Speaker 1

That concludes the latest episode of the Post-Acute point of view from MatrixCare. We have a lot of guests and topics coming up that you won’t want to miss, so be sure to subscribe. If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast and if you have a topic you’d like us to discuss, leave us a review. To learn more about MatrixCare and our solutions and services, visit matrixcare.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Thank you for listening. Be well, and we’ll see you next time.