Damar Services Partners with Resultant as True IT Partner to Serve a Growing Number of Clients

Founded in 1967 and now one of America’s leading providers of services to people with developmental, behavioral, and intellectual disabilities, Damar Services continues to grow rapidly. And now its technology is keeping up with that progress.  

A family-focused organization 

Damar helps its clients live rewarding lives through its residential services, school, therapeutic environment, foster care services, outpatient mental health, and a host of other critical support services.  

Started by a couple who’d struggled to find services for their own children, Damar takes a highly personalized approach to supporting clients and their families. Forging relationships among staff and clients is an important element of the services Damar provides, and that philosophy carried out through as many services as possible, right down to the outsourced IT partner Damar had relied on for years. Working with an onsite IT expert was essential to the organization.  

As the organization grew, however, it began to need more than it was getting from its technology.   

Taking a new approach to IT managed services 

“Our dream was that our technology would work like our electricity, and it never did. As we’d grown, it had been kind of pieced together with paper clips and glue.” 

Jenny Peters, Chief Strategy Officer for Damar

Critical functions like keeping medical records updated suffered as Damar’s network and wireless connectivity lagged. Email security fell short, equipment inventory management hadn’t been reliably codified, and processes hadn’t been updated.  

Because technology strategy hadn’t been part of the conversation between Damar and its former IT MSP, Damar’s growth had happened outside of its technology ecosystem, rather than with its support. With maintenance issues ruling the day, Damar hadn’t achieved the kind of alignment between technology and organizational strategy that would not only stave off IT surprises but help improve and expand services. 

Damar started an RFP process and determined that Resultant would be an entirely new kind of IT MSP: “We were hoping for a partner,” Peters said, “and that’s exactly what we found.” Even so, trepidation was high after working with just one partner over the past several years. Our team started by getting to know the Damar staff and their challenges. They worked with Damar’s leadership team to understand where the organization stood and where it planned to grow. And then they got to work.  

“We’d expected onboarding to be more challenging than it was. We worked for weeks with your team when we transitioned. They kept assuring us everything would be fine, and we kept not believing them. And then it was fine. And now—we were just joking the other day—our technology really does run like our electricity, which was always our dream. Huge issues aren’t taking us down, taking us out of productivity for hours on end. That started with our transition team, who met us where we were and helped us get up to speed.” 

Jenny Peters, Chief Strategy Officer for Damar

Seeing real gains—quickly 

Improvements happened fast, like getting the troubled boardroom conferencing system up and running and implementing two-factor authentication to protect Damar’s email. Our team quickly brought the inventory management and loaner equipment processes up to speed and improved third-party vendor management over Damar’s security, camera, phone, and other providers.  

More critical to day-to-day functioning came from moving the organization’s wifi past constant outages to steady reliability. Employees now can depend on their connectivity, which makes their constant need to access and update medical records significantly less cumbersome.  

Damar immediately appreciated having ready support employees could rely on: “The biggest improvement for our staff overall is the help desk support, which is responsive and super knowledgeable,” Peters said. “We never feel like they’re far away, and that’s fantastic.”  

In addition to remote support, Damar has a dedicated Resultant expert on site full-time. Not typically part of our IT MSP contracts, providing an embedded employee was something Damar felt strongly about because the organization prioritizes relationships, access, and familiarity.  

In all aspects of its work, client safety is Damar’s primary concern, and Peters notes that working with Resultant has elevated safety all around: “Our electronic medical records system works,” she said. “For some clients, we need to update every 3-5 minutes because there’s a critical need for support, and we can keep updated to the minute.” Peters also points to having one point of contact managing all third-party providers keeps a steadier eye on security throughout all Damar locations. In general, she said, the tools the staff relies on just work better.  

“For us, technology was always a problem—never a solution to anything. Now it’s a solution for so many things. We don’t have the worries we had a year ago. We trust Resultant and know that they have our backs.” 

Jenny Peters, Chief Strategy Officer for Damar

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