Case Study | Core Health Networks

The Company

Founded in 2008 and based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, CORE Health Networks, sister company of CORE LLC., is the leading provider of integrated occupational medicine services. CORE Health Networks implements medical data management systems for top-rated companies and operates a nationwide network of over 1,200 occupational medicine clinics to serve their clients. Their services include TimeZero Injury ManagementSM, medical surveillance program management and substance abuse testing.

Among their services, CORE provides onsite medical services, which brings mobile clinics to a jobsite for physical exams, drawing blood, hearing testing, chest x-rays, and more. This service provides businesses with an easier way to comply with OSHA requirements and prevents employees from having to spend several hours at an offsite clinic for testing.

The Challenge

For a job site that employs hundreds, or even thousands of employees, access to an onsite clinic can save thousands of hours and limit the company’s loss in productivity.

According to Chad Scott, CORE Health Networks Managing Partner and IT Director for CORE, LLC, offsite clinic visits often take three to four hours away from an employee’s workday. Onsite clinic visits range from an hour to an hour and a half while saving travel costs for employees and keeping productivity for the employer as high as possible.

CORE serves 1,200 clinics from coast to coast, so thousands of clients are accessing their hosted solution at any given time. Chad stated that one of the most important aspects of his position is “Making sure that we have good uptime for customers that use our hosted software applications. We have to make sure they are online and available for our customers at all times, and have minimal downtime. Our customers may be scheduling after hours, nights and weekends.”

The Solution

Ensuring Never Down® connectivity is vital to a business that relies on hosted software like CORE Health Networks. Redundancy is key, both for communication links and WAN equipment. If an outage occurs, customers around the country could lose the ability to submit information and to schedule an onsite visit. By using redundant Ecessa PowerLink® units in hardware failover mode, CORE has been able to implement a system that fits their needs, gives them confidence and keeps their customers happy.

“The Ecessa PowerLinks in particular have been extremely valuable to us. We use them in our corporate offices as a WAN aggregator. We are able to ensure that we have optimal bandwidth for both uploads and downloads,” said Scott. “Ecessa tech support has always been readily available and willing to bend over backwards to assist us. We’ve been really pleased with the performance, not only of the units themselves, but also with their tech support.”

At their data center, they have an additional Ecessa unit for redundancy. That way, if they should lose one PowerLink, the other will take over seamlessly and CORE Health Networks won’t have any downtime for their customers. Scott stated, “We’re trying to optimize our uptime, and by having that additional unit we ensure that we can accommodate the needs of our customers and staff.”