Industry: Healthcare
Annual Revenue: $30 million
Number of Employees: 175
Rackspace Hosting Solution: Intensive
About Concuity
Concuity, a healthcare division of Trintech, offers industry-leading solutions that increase hospital and clinic revenue by identifying and correcting payment issues during the contract revenue cycle. It helps healthcare organizations of all types and sizes to better manage contracts and improve cash flow and mitigate revenue problems. Founded in 2000, the company was acquired in December 2006 by Trintech, a leading provider of integrated financial governance, transaction risk management and compliance solutions.
Situation
For years Concuity has helped hospitals and clinics across the country create and negotiate fair contracts with insurance companies. It also identifies and helps recover on underpaid and denied accounts through Clear Contracts, its highly scaleable, 100 percent web-based, solution.
This revenue-cycle solution goes beyond simple calculation engines. By automating the contract itself, it removes the challenges associated with the manual process of entering and tracking contractual requirements. Eliminating the hassle of managing multiple filing systems, ClearContracts allows customers to scan contract documents and then store and catalog the images by payer, product and effective date.
With contracts and all associated documents stored electronically, it's easy for anyone to access the imaged documents and interpret contract language. The result—business efficiency is improved while administrative costs are lowered.
Since its inception in 2000, Concuity hosted its entire web infrastructure in-house. This included four databases that housed all of their customers' data pertaining to contracts, revenue recovery and reimbursement and cash flow. But with only one web server service for each client, the potential for downtime always loomed overhead.
"One time we had a server go down in-house due to a power problem and it wasn't resolved for two days," says David Chen, DBA, Concuity. "When our website is down, everything is down. Customers can't access the website or their data. Our business bottom-line depends entirely on our databases."
Solution
When Trintech acquired Concuity in December 2006, they decided to move Concuity's infrastructure over to Rackspace, where their infrastructure had already been hosted for the past two years.
"Trintech knew uptime, reliability and flexibility was paramount when it came to our website and databases, and Rackspace has a reputation for delivering this," says Chen. "Since moving to Rackspace, the most downtime we've experienced is minutes and usually that's attributed to tests and upgrades."
But the biggest benefit Concuity experienced when moving to Rackspace was being able to take advantage of its Database Administration Service offering.
"When we moved to Rackspace, the number one thing we wanted to add to our database was Oracle's premier technology, Data Guard," says Chen. "The problem was no one here knew anything about installing Data Guard. So when we contacted Rackspace, their dedicated DBAs had extensive knowledge on the subject and were able to install and run Oracle and Data Guard without any major problems."
Chen goes on to explain why Data Guard is essential to running effective databases. Basically, there is a primary database and a standby database running Data Guard. If for some reason the primary goes down, it can do a fail-over into the standby, which is always in sync with the primary. Sometimes it's unclear why the primary database went down and, once the issue is uncovered, it can take some time to resolve. So instead of being completely down, Data Guard turns your standby database into the primary in only a matter of minutes.
"Even though I consider myself an experienced DBA, there are some areas like Data Guard where I need help and Rackspace's DBAs were very knowledgeable and responsive, especially during the installation process," admits Chen. "Sometimes the primary and standby were out of sync for some reason during setup. Our Rackspace DBA would always resolve the issue and talk me through the problem so it wouldn't happen again, which also greatly helped when we upgraded our Oracle software from 9i to 10g."
Concuity initially launched with Rackspace running Oracle's 9i software. On a Saturday, they decided to upgrade to 10g, which Concuity tried to do on their own. Chen recalls the upgrade was going smoothly while in the development environment, but when they moved to the production environment, problems arose.
Chen called his Rackspace DBA and together they worked through the issues. In a matter of hours they were able to complete the upgrade and get the databases all in sync in plenty of time for Monday, when Concuity's customers would begin accessing their databases. Chen admits the upgrade took a few more hours than planned, but the process was still very smooth and manageable for a weekend.
"The most important thing was we were back up and running faster and more efficient on Monday and our customers didn't even notice," exclaims Chen. "And that's what we strive for, customer satisfaction—just like Rackspace."
Benefits
The Rackspace DBA Services Team provides Concuity with expert guidance, consulting services, troubleshooting and 24x7x365 coverage for Oracle database problems. And Fanatical Support®, Rackspace's award-winning customer service, backs all of this. It's an ideal solution that suits both Concuity's technical requirements and budget. Now, instead of enlisting the help of an expensive third party to help resolve an issue, the company's DBAs can always rely on their database experts at Rackspace.
Currently, Concuity has nine DL385 HP Servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, five DL585 HP databases running Oracle 10g, seven routers, managed storage and backup, a load balancer, custom monitoring and a Pix 535UR firewall. It also has two terabytes of storage in Rackspace's SAN.
To prevent them from overloading their website again, Concuity now has three web servers and a load balancer, rather than just the one original web server. Now, if one server was to fail, or if they wanted to perform maintenance on one, the other two could handle the traffic. The company no longer needs to worry about customers being unable to access their databases.
"There are so many benefits we see by hosting with Rackspace. We rely on them for increased performance, uptime, scalability—all that stuff you want in a good provider. And so far, it's been a great move," says Chen. "Rackspace's Fanatical Support is real. I experienced it every time I talk with my DBA or submit a ticket. Their service, response rate and performance are top notch. I just can't thank my DBA enough. He really went above and beyond when it came to setting up my databases. Very fanatical!"
