Aveanna Reinvents Pediatric Home Healthcare

The private equity-backed Aveanna Healthcare was created to reinvent home healthcare for children and adolescents. “Aveanna is the largest pediatric home healthcare organization in the U.S.,” says Joseph Sharp, assistant vice president of technology strategy, governance, and architecture at Aveanna Healthcare.

 Like many organizations that have grown by merger and acquisition, Aveanna relied on disparate applications and infrastructure. Aveanna set out to align technology with the needs of delivering the best care outcomes.

The foundation of successful transformation is Aveanna’s data centers in Atlanta and Dallas, built for the highest availability and redundancy. “In pediatric home healthcare, we can’t afford a single minute of downtime,” Sharp says. “The network has to be bulletproof. We can’t lose visibility to 30,000 critical-care patients.”

Aveanna worked with Stream Networks, an Atlanta-based consultant and managed services provider, to review its technology. Together, Aveanna and Stream Networks designed a best-of-breed data center that delivers agility and easy scalability as the business grows. “Juniper is the basis for a high-performance, extensible, and stable platform that will support Aveanna’s current and future data processing requirements,” says Andrew Martin, senior technology partner at Stream Networks.

Each data center has an identical architecture for a simple, modular design that is easy to scale out as workloads grow. “The network is the core of everything,” Sharp says. “Without a network, a business doesn’t exist. Juniper is a rock-solid foundation.”

“With high-performing technology, we can increase overall efficiency and support our caregivers in the field,” Sharp says. Aveanna has more than 40,000 clinical and administrative staff in its pediatric home healthcare, staffing, and medical supplies businesses. The outcomes are stellar.

“With our entire data center refresh, including optimizing applications and databases and new compute, storage, and networking, we’re seeing a 30 to 50 percent increase in application responsiveness,” Sharp says. “Application access is near-real-time.”

That experience impacts not only skilled nurses and therapists who tend to children in their homes, but also Aveanna’s schedulers who manage the flow of patient care, ensuring that each child receives quality service and their families are satisfied with care. “

Overall increased application performance means we can fill shifts faster with qualified caregivers,” Sharp says. “The bottom line is that we can put more nurses in the field to take care of more children.”

Aveanna nurses and therapists bring skill and compassion to the lives of children with special needs and help support their families. With an innovative technology-empowered approach and the foundation of Juniper multicloud, Aveanna can continue to care for our most fragile children.