How a Mental Health Nonprofit Secures Endpoints for Compassionate Care

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At the center of community care, a lifeline for mental health is making a lasting impact — strengthened by technology that ensures security without compromising compassion.

Mental-health center Family and Children’s Services (FCS), based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has helped transform the lives of members of its local community with programs to support their well-being, including child abuse and trauma support, as well as counseling for families and those suffering from substance abuse and addiction. The organization is more than 100 years old, serves more than 150,000 people each year, and offers services in more than 50 schools. It also more than doubled its staff in recent years and now has 1,500 employees who provide a variety of services, many that have moved online since the start of the pandemic.

These changes created a challenge for FCS CIO Brent Harris, who was responsible for protecting a rapidly growing organization with a sprawling IT environment and a boom in the number of endpoints in use. At the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, FCS distributed approximately 2,000 iPads and other devices to clients so that clinicians could offer teletherapy and telemedicine services. That brought the total number of devices that needed to be managed to around 3,500.

FCS was willing to spend on its core mission — serving the community’s mental health needs — so most of its headcount growth was in its clinical staff. But Harris still had to manage with the same number of IT staff to keep costs down. Automation was key to solving this challenge.

“We needed a way to automate, to buy back time instead of trying to solve problems with manpower,” Harris says. “We try to solve problems with technology.”

Piloting an Endpoint Management Platform

The IT staff needed visibility into which software packages were on each device and whether the devices were being patched properly. The legacy system in use didn’t give Harris the confidence that his team had that insight.

“Devices were on the network that we didn’t see, and software was on someone’s device that shouldn’t be there that we didn’t pick up on,” Harris says. “Most of the things we found we found manually.”

When FCS deployed Tanium as part of a pilot, the endpoint management platform immediately found devices that the legacy system had missed, Harris says. A tragic incident in the community shortly after illustrated the importance of having endpoint management technology with an accurate view of the environment.

“There was an event in our community where there was an active shooter, not at Family and Children’s Services, but at a healthcare facility that a lot of us were familiar with,” Harris says. “A lot of people in our agency had worked there in the past or had friends there, and so it really hit near home.”

FCS needed a reliable employee notification system to ensure that the healthcare provider was prepared if a similar situation were to unfold. FCS was looking for a guarantee that everyone would receive information — such as employee notifications and software updates — pushed out by the system onto their individual devices.

“We would push it out to 1,000 endpoints and then get a report that said 796 of them received it, and we would have to manually go try to figure out where there were gaps,” Harris says. “Tanium is far better at doing that. And in this case, you know, it’s really life or death. If that scenario were to ever occur, we need to make sure that 100% of the devices on the network have the agent installed and it’s running.”

A trial run is an essential part of evaluating which technologies to purchase and deploy because it can help illuminate how well the solution meets the organization’s needs, Harris says.

“We were able to do a pilot, and we were pretty convinced within a matter of days and weeks, not months, that this tool was going to be a very important part of our technology stack going forward,” he adds.

About the Author

Jennifer Lawinski is a writer and editor with more than 20 years experience in media, covering a wide range of topics including business, news, culture, science, technology and cybersecurity. After earning a Master’s degree in Journalism from Boston University, she started her career as a beat reporter for The Daily News of Newburyport. She has since written for a variety of publications including CNN, Fox News, Tech Target, CRN, CIO Insight, MSN News and Live Science. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two cats.