“We do everything for more health in this One World – in solidarity with the poor, sustainably and professionally, with charity and expertise. We want to strengthen health systems in countries of the South. To this end, we rely on consulting, further training and research. We also see political advocacy as our mission, because many problems worldwide are man-made. We are working on solutions in various networks.” — medmissio, Würzburg

For more than 100 years, the non-profit organization medmissio has been committed to holistic and sustainable health work around the world. medmissio has been providing health education and counseling for decades, especially in Africa, South America and Asia. Their target group consists of people who do not have the financial means for adequate health care. It's not about the money, but about help and charity. About 25 employees work for medmissio. For example, they provide the "Medbox," which contains emergency response documents, medical information, and specialized toolboxes used to fight Ebola or cholera/infectious diseases etc.

Documents in particular must be easily accessible online on smartphones and should always contain up-to-date medical publications. The digital documents also need to be updated regularly – which is a demanding task in global work, given the often deficient technical infrastructure in the partner countries. A powerful, reliable IT system is needed as a basis for this, in which ISO Professional Services GmbH supports medmissio.
 

Our tasks

In July 2021, we took over full-service support for medmissio. This makes us the point of contact for all IT topics and IT related issues within the organization. For example, there was a major power outage that the old UPS (uninterruptible power supply) could not withstand. Our team acted promptly and as a result, we were able to quickly restore operations by installing a newer, more powerful solution. We also increased the stability of the system and the IT environment by purchasing a new UPS that was better suited to the requirements. We have therefore started to patch all IT systems on a monthly basis so that they are always up-to-date and security risks are minimized.

However, the majority of the work is user support. We receive numerous questions about access to applications, network shares, mailbox authorizations, user administration, security issues and, of course, Outlook. Thanks to our customer- and service-oriented approach, we are always able to answer these questions quickly. Response times for standard inquiries average three hours, and even less than one hour for prioritized cases, which is well below the deadline defined in the service level agreement on average.
 

The outlook

After the first two years or so of successful cooperation, medmissio is considering having all the applications and services they use (file storage, accounting software, time recording system, Active Directory, etc.) hosted by ISO. Currently, this would be two Node ESX clusters plus storage including all licenses for the operating systems, user CALs and backup. Currently, the local infrastructure is completely moved to the hosting of ISO Professional Services GmbH and compressed. To this end, a migration of the on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365 is planned.

In addition, we conduct a process analysis with our customer in order to identify and then implement potential improvements. Specifically, this involves ECM, i.e., digital file storage, as well as the digitization of accounting processes.