ITnorth and Office 365 - Cloud for Healthcare in a Box

VICTORIA, British Columbia - March 27, 2015 - PRLog -- ITnorth, an award-winning service provider based in Fort St. John, BC, rehabilitated RebalanceMD’s crippled IT infrastructure with a Microsoft solution that relies on Office 365 for business productivity, Lync for communications, and Azure for back-up and recovery.

Orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Patrick McAllister and registered physiotherapist Stefan Fletcher had a flash of insight one day while standing together next to a soccer field:  if they could merge their two areas of medicine under one umbrella, the result would be a seamless transition for patients from doctor to therapist, eliminating the previously mandatory referral system and reducing wait times, inconvenience and red tape. In parallel, they envisioned a franchise business: taking the same unified, fluid practices across the province to provide an improved healthcare environment for BC residents.

From that germ of an idea, RebalanceMD was born.  Based in Victoria, BC, it quickly became the largest clinic of its kind in the province, and offers services ranging from new joint implantation to sports medicine and rehabilitation. A franchise clinic has recently opened in Vancouver.

What the partners quickly came to realize was that the pressures put on their aging small business server were too great, and they sustained regular and prolonged downtimes as their system crashed daily.  They went in search of a provider who could deliver a flexible, scalable IT infrastructure and a comprehensive solution for their clinics.

“Physicians don’t want to deal with bureaucratic paperwork – we just want everything to run smoothly in the background so we can focus on giving our patients the best care possible,” said Stefan Fletcher, RebalanceMD co-founder and CEO.

ITnorth was engaged to first stabilize the systems, and to develop, implement and manage a repeatable solution that RebalanceMD could re-sell to other clinics that were eager to embrace the revolutionary concept of a unified healthcare delivery model.

ITnorth developed a solution they call “Cloud for Healthcare in a Box”, which brings together Office 365, Lync, Azure/private cloud (SPLA) hosting, Antivirus, Backups, DNS management, web hosting, support and maintenance.

Deploying Microsoft’s Cloud solution platform with Azure Disaster Recovery backup system, the entire infrastructure is controlled by SCVMM in the cloud, with high availability VM cluster and an on-premise Hyper-V server for backup.  With an enterprise-grade server centralized to ITnorth’s private cloud, new RebalanceMD franchises will be able the join the infrastructure through a VPN connection or via RemoteApp and Microsoft App-V services wherever it’s needed. The full-package service delivered the turnkey solution RebalanceMD was looking for.

“If I may put this in the terminology of our clinics, ITnorth’s Microsoft cloud solution isn’t just a temporary brace or a splint, it’s more like orthotics – it allows us to go on with our business comfortably and securely, with the knowledge that we have all the support we need. You might say, it’s a perfect fit, and we couldn’t move forward without it.” Stefan Fletcher RBMD.

About ITnorth:    ITnorth serves a multitude of industries, including healthcare, oil & gas, construction, government and forestry, and has become a trusted IT provider in Western Canada, with offices in Fort St. John, Victoria, Edmonton and Calgary. They have earned a CDN award for Best Cloud Solution, an IMPACT award for Cloud Infrastructure of the Year in 2013, and Microsoft Partner of the Year awards in 2012 and 2014.

Contact info: Allan Bagelman, 778.432.3686, allan.bagelman@itnorth.ca