Wickenburg Community Hospital is a non-profit healthcare organization that operates rural community hospitals and clinics in the Wickenburg Arizona area. Wickenburg Hospital is a critical access hospital and level IV trauma center, supporting the needs of resident in the surrounding 3300 square miles. They provide quality health and wellness services where the patient, family, and community come first.
Derek Dominguez is a systems administrator and one of three technicians responsible for providing IT management and support services to Wickenburg’s caregivers and staff. When Derek was first brought into Wickenburg as a desktop support technician, the team relied heavily on in-person remediation or an outdated version of TeamViewer to provide support. In addition to TeamViewer, Wickenburg used the PDQ suite (PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory) for asset management and software deployment. “When I first started,” says Derek, “we didn’t really have visibility into our managed devices and couldn’t be proactive with our service delivery.”
Shortly after Derek joined the organization, one of their workstations was compromised because it was running an outdated version of TeamViewer. “The compromise significantly pushed up our timeline to update our IT management technology stack,” says Derek, who comes from a cybersecurity background.
Derek explains, “We were really just looking for a replacement for TeamViewer before we came across NinjaOne.” One feature that drew the Wickenburg team to explore Ninja is the ability to use one of multiple remote control failover options. “Because of the compromise, we really wanted to switch to a new remote control tool and having multiple integrated options was perfect for us,” says Derek.
While exploring remote control options, they came across Ninja’s endpoint management software. “During our demo we saw that we were able to replace TeamViewer, PDQ Deploy, and PDQ Inventory with one tool. Not only that, it’s fully integrated so we can remote into a device or deploy software from the same screen on which we get hardware and software details. Having one tool to fully manage our 500 or so workstations and servers significantly reduces the cost and complexity of our IT management technology stack,” says Derek.
Since becoming a partner in early 2020, NinjaOne has become the core IT management software for Derek and the other members of his team. “I cannot image how the three of us would manage all these devices across multiple locations without a tool like Ninja. I have so much control and access – anything I need to do, I can do in Ninja. Without it, I’d often have to physically go to a machine, get the data I need, and then start solving the problem,” explains Derek.
With multiple locations in the Wickenburg areas – one as far as an hour drive away – being able to manage devices remotely is a major time saver. “Because I can solve nine out of ten problems 100% remotely, Ninja saves me at least an hour just in travel time each day. Whether that’s 15 minutes a few times a day to walk to a neighboring building or 2 hours of round trip driving to a remote site. I can spend that hour (or those hours) providing support to our caregivers and staff,” says Derek.
Wickenburg has two particularly critical servers that they rely on Ninja to manage more effectively – a VOIP telephony server and a file server for patient health records. If the performance of either of these servers is impeded or if either server goes down, the productivity of all employees would be significantly impacted and patient care could suffer. Derek and his team have built a robust series of custom alerts and automations to ensure these servers run smoothly. “It’s incredibly important that we’re able to identify any potential issues with these servers before they become a problem. Whether it’s a potential drive failure, irregular performance, or access issues, we’re able to create alerts for proactive remediation. We’ve also automated a lot of critical tasks like backup and patching for these servers so they can happen outside of standard care hours which minimizes the impact on business operations and patient care,” says Derek. “After investing time in setting up these automations, they’ve been low- or no-touch ever since.”
In addition to protecting critical servers, Wickenburg has deployed Ninja to all their employee endpoints and devices used by caregivers. “Device security is obviously a huge priority for us, given our need to be HIPAA compliant,” says Derek. “We automate patching for all our devices and are actively pursuing 100% patch compliance.” In addition, Ninja is critical for direct support, “When someone calls in, I can do a quick lookup and see which device they’re using, which is critical since many devices are shared. Once I’ve found the device, I can quickly hop on and solve any issues they’re facing so the user can get back to helping patients,” says Derek. Live hardware and software inventories are also critical for Derek and his team – they’re able to quickly prioritize which devices need hardware or OS updates, get budget approval, and upgrade those devices for better performance.
“I’m very happy that we went with NinjaOne. We were able to reduce complexity by consolidating our IT management technology stack down to a single software, reduce software license costs, and make the team more efficient and effective all by switching to NinjaOne,” says Derek. “At Wickenburg, we strive to be a world-class health and wellness leader for the communities we serve. The IT team aims to be a world-class support organization for our amazing caregivers.”
