Moving Away from a Legacy Platform Cuts Costs for American Family Care

Legacy infrastructure isn’t just an obstacle to innovation. For many growing businesses, it’s also a substantial cost-sink.

That was the case for American Family Care (AFC), one of the largest providers of healthcare systems in the United States. Founded in 1982 by the late Dr. Bruce Arwin, the company pioneered the concept of non-emergency room urgent care.

“When I started years ago, we had 185 clinics,” said Claudius Moore, Chief Information Officer at AFC. “Now in 2024, we are 375 clinics strong.”

The AFC healthcare system has grown significantly, but they’re always aiming higher. They forecast 500 locations in operation by 2025, making care more convenient and accessible for increased patient populations. Achieving this milestone would require a host of modern technologies, starting with an upgrade of their existing legacy network.

Dated network, dated capabilities.

AFC was ready to upgrade their legacy network, which was neither sustainable nor future-ready.

“We were experiencing an unacceptable number of technical issues,” Moore says. “Every day, we were putting out fires, ranging from network disruptions to dropped calls that prevented us from interfacing with customers.”

These issues led to dissatisfied customers, which, coupled with downtime, was a significant challenge for AFC. “We realized we would have to continue to increase our stability, security and scale to continue delighting our customers and meeting the demands of the future,” Moore says.

One of these future demands included the ability to accept automated payments without human interaction, a major pain point that wasn’t supported by AFC’s existing legacy system.

AFC was curious to find ways to reduce costs while improving system performance, so they contacted Lumen Technologies to discuss their options for migrating away from their old MPLS platform.

Moving into the future with SD-WAN

“We needed a secure environment that provided visibility,” Moore says. “We also needed something that we could use to leverage advancements in technology that were happening on a day-to-day basis.”

The Lumen team presented a path forward: converting AFC’s old MPLS network to Lumen^® SD‑WAN and Lumen^® Dedicated Internet Access (DIA). Together, the solutions offered enough speed and bandwidth to run all of AFC’s cloud-based EMRs. The upgrades were also more cost effective, which would allow AFC to reinvest the savings into new technologies, including Meraki and feature-rich telephony such as Zoom Phone.

Their upgrade would increase access to modern features, including the ability to take automated payments through a Zoom interactive agent, reducing unnecessary overhead and streamlining the company’s medical practice for billing.

“We loved the idea of utilizing new systems like Zoom Phone to make a difference in our environment,” Moore says.

Moore and his team understood the innate value in modernization. The streamlined project plan and future-focused objectives provided tremendous opportunities for patient engagement and efficiencies, and the enhanced stability, security and scalability of these solutions would be a big win for AFC.

Providing high-quality healthcare at a fraction of the cost

The Lumen product team developed an open communication channel to support AFC throughout the implementation. And as the relationship grows stronger, they continue to provide ongoing technical support.

Today, AFC is seeing more patients than ever, with more efficiency and fewer complaints. Operational improvements include:

• Patient calls picked up 95% of the time
• Dropped call rate of <2%
• More secure network environment with 99.9% uptime
• $30,000 saved each month in operational expense

The company saves $30,000 in operating expenses per month compared to their previous network, and they’re looking forward to investing more in the company’s digital transformation efforts.

Seizing these opportunities will enable AFC to maximize their resources and expand their network, reducing the strain on emergency rooms and streamlining the patient experience. With Lumen, they will continue to reach more communities and increase healthcare access for people who need it most.

To learn more about how Lumen helps healthcare and other industries minimize costs and maximize performance, explore our recent customer success stories.

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Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.

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