IM boosts health care company

Because of its geographically dispersed staff and high percentage of telecommuting employees, Intellicare Inc., which operates health-related call centers, has drawn big benefits from implementing an instant messaging platform.

Through a network of medical contact centers and telecommuting nurses, the company offers medical phone support for some 250 clients, such as hospitals, health insurance companies and doctor group practices. For example, a group of doctors may hire Intellicare to handle their patient calls after business hours.

Instant messaging (IM) has helped Intellicare create a sense of virtual community among its employees, facilitated the provision of remote training and boosted real-time communications within the company, improving the flow and availability of information needed to provide services.

"Most of our work is done over the phone. We have implemented our business using a remote workforce model so we can leverage (geographically dispersed) clinical resources that would not normally be available to a traditional bricks-and-mortar organization," said Jeff Forbes, Intellicare's chief information officer. "Keeping that remote workforce model in mind is the reason why we selected an IM platform when we did."

Intellicare, which is privately held and was founded in 1997, has an operations and data center in its Portland, Maine, headquarters and call centers and other facilities in Connecticut, Maryland, Texas and Missouri. But about 75 percent of its nurses work from their homes. Due to the dispersed nature of its staff, the company decided it needed to invest in a messaging and collaboration platform that could support its virtual workforce. It made the decision to replace Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange messaging and collaboration platform with competitor Notes from IBM Corp.'s Lotus division, and soon after, about two years ago, it implemented Lotus' Sametime enterprise IM system.

"One of the drivers to migrating to Notes was that we were looking for a far broader architecture to support the business," Forbes said. "We weren't just interested in e-mail only, but in a broader platform that would facilitate education and communication and a sense of corporate community throughout Intellicare."

Prior to this, Intellicare employees weren't allowed to use IM. "We didn't permit it because we didn't have a secure platform and our IM platform carries in it data that is sensitive," Forbes said. "We like Sametime because it's an encrypted environment, it's well integrated with Notes' security model and it provides an auditable process: you can log IM conversations so if there's any issue we can go back and recreate what happened."

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