Acano & VBHCS provide instant video therapy to Veterans in Crisis

This week in “Where in the World are Alex Price & Ron Coe?”, we come to you from Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  It was certainly a very special Veteran’s Day as we arrived at the center of town and heard the marching band playing the Star Spangled Banner while a group of Veterans were being applauded by the locals.  We’re here this week to do the installation of Volunteer Behavioral Health Care Services’ (VBHCS) new Acano deployment.  This is such a great organization and application that we wanted to share a bit of their story.

VBHCS’s Mission: “To serve individuals, families and communities through prevention, treatment and recovery services, ensuring that help today leads to a better tomorrow.”.  They cover about 11,000 square miles of Tennessee via their 18 clinic locations while serving approximately 45,000 people in 31 counties.  Their services address mental health illness, drug addictions, PTSD, and mental health crisis. A large percentage of VBHCS's clients are veterans.

While eating dinner last night with the VBHCS team, we really began to understand the scale at which their programs operate.  For example: their call center receives about 300 Mental Health Crisis calls a day.  VBHCS also has approximately 1800 therapy, case management, and doctor in-take sessions a week.  An average day for a VBHCS doctor includes seeing clients back to back for 8 straight hours. 

Acano is proud to become a part of the process used to help VBHCS’s patients and their families.  Our solution will be leveraged to connect Volunteer’s Doctors to remote clinics so that they can evaluate clients without needing to travel long distances.  The Mobile Crisis Response team will use Acano running on a laptop and Mifi to deliver critically time-sensitive therapy over video directly to their client's home.  VBHCS “Access Now” is a new initiative to provide clients with same day service.  This new service will heavily leverage the Acano platform to connect clients from all over Tennessee to an available specialist.

So why did VBHCS choose Acano over companies like Polycom?  Per Robert Funk, Network Engineer for Volunteer Behavioral Health, “We selected Acano for the Quality of video service, Quality of audio service, Interoperability, Support/Maintenance, and Value.”. 

With such a high-volume of usage expected, downtime was also not an option.  As such, Volunteer Behavioral Health took advantage of Acano’s pooled licensing model to add high-availability without doubling the cost of their deployment (as they would have need to do if using one of the competitive solutions).   In fact, a fully resilient Acano solution (which meets the needs of today with the ability to scale on the same footprint tomorrow), was less than half the cost of the next lowest proposal which did not include any resiliency. 

With Acano, VBHCS doesn’t need to sacrifice quality or scale.  Why is that?  Because this is a next-generation software platform, coded from the ground-up to have all of the goodness of legacy video technologies, while positioning our clients for future services that have yet to be defined.  When you take a legacy bridging platform and turn it into a “virtual edition” you are not improving the original architecture.  You’ll just find yourself continuing to stack servers, licenses, software loads, and products on top of each other.

This evening we’re looking forward to running the first board meeting on Volunteer Behavioral Health’s Acano platform.  We will connect board members all over the state together for the first time on a platform that is so clear that as one VBHCS Doctor said during our trial: “We can see the pimples on a face”.  If that helps their Doctors deliver better services than so be it! 

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