Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with
Appliance-Based Remote Support

Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
Now, if you aren't familiar with the HIPAA security regulations, they came out in April 2005, applied to all healthcare related entities and any of their business partners. And, it relates to protecting and securing the patient's data and this is data that typically identifies a patient: address, names, phone numbers, social security numbers. And, it protects this data during access, transmission, and storage. And, in our case, for remote control software, we wanted to make sure that the part we were going to use had 256-bit AES encryption and that there was a form of authorization authentication on the other end that was useful.

So, we looked for a variety of different solutions. First of all, eliminated any kind of software installs, like pcAnywhere, that did not meet the fast and easy criteria. We didn't want anything pre-configured on the customer's end. So, that made us look at the hosted providers. This would be WebEx or Placeware, Live Meeting, or GoToAssist. And, we also looked in appliances and the only one we looked at was Bomgar™ and we chose Bomgar™ because it met all of our criteria. It was pretty fast. What's really neat is that their download is less than 400K. It was easy. No client configuration is required on either end whether it's our reps or on the customer's side. It was fairly inexpensive. The costs are comparable to WebEx or Placeware for the first year, but the second year support renewals are much cheaper.

And then, it was reliable. We can essentially manage it here at our IT department and we can connect anywhere over the internet as long as Port 443 was open and that's pretty much the case in most firewalls. And finally, it was HIPAA compliant. It did incorporate 256-bit SSL encryption and also allowed for customers to authorize connections. And also, cancel or close any connections are their convenience.