As the end of 2016 approaches, we realise that this has been BlueBird’s most exciting, challenging and busiest year yet. Despite the conclusion of the Ontario MD funding program to assist Doctors transition to EMR, we continued to grow at a rapid pace! The driving force behind this growth has been the support and loyalty of our clients, vendors, and partners. From all of our BlueBird team members we want to extend our sincerest gratitude to all of you who have made our success a reality.
2016 saw a lot of changes for BlueBird in order to keep up with the demand of our growth but also to manage a lot of the challenges that we were faced with. We would like to share some of those milestones with you:
BlueBird goes west! A long time in the strategic planning phase, we reached a point that we have the size, knowledge, and experience to expend our support services to Western Canada. Our starting base is Calgary and we will soon be staffing field techs to cover other cities and provinces.
Staff growth. In order to improve your Help Desk experience and reduce call wait times, we have doubled the size of our Help Desk support team. While our new team members are all experienced system analysts, it does take some time for them to learn the idiosyncrasies of EMRs and the needs of medical clinics. We want to thank you for your patience and understanding as they become part of the BlueBird team. For 2017 we are continuing to recruit team members in the Toronto GTA area but also in our Western markets to service our new clients in Alberta.
BlueBird 2.0. As the company matures, we have, through our experience and changes in the market place come up with new and better ways to serve and support you. Internally, we have adopted a new support standard which we have code named BlueBird 2.0. This includes new security software for viruses and malware, new proactive remote management tools, improved clinic documentation, and other tools to more efficiently and securely maintain your networks. You may have been contacted by our staff already to schedule these updates or request more information.
Network Operations Center (NOC). Up until a few months ago our help desk team was responsible for monitoring pro-active alerts from our client’s devices, servers and network. In order to improve response times and efficiency a new Network Operations Center or (NOC) team has been created. This team is responsible for monitoring our live network reporting tools and have already been very successful in preventing a significant number of failures while ensuring max production and efficiency! Preventative medicine is the best medicine!
Fighting Cybercrime. 2016 has seen a surge in ransomware attacks especially in the Canadian health care sector. Our team moved quickly during a cyber-attack surge this summer in order to protect our clients and within a short amount of time we were able to safeguard their servers while at the same time disinfecting them. One of the drastic measures we had to take was to disable Remote Desktop Access to a large number of clients. A new VPN solution was immediately introduced and although this caused some inconvenience to many of our clients we are proud to say that no-client data was lost or compromised during this process!
Partnership with CCIRC. In our continuous effort to be one step ahead of the “bad guys” and protect our clients’ networks and data from cyber-attacks we have partnered with the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre (CCIRC). Our collaboration with the CCIRC has allowed us to improve our ability to protect YOUR data by putting in place proactive processes and security protocols.
In closing, our pledge for 2017 is to continue improving our services and technology solutions offerings allowing you to focus on what is most important to you: your patients.