Transcript

I think that Tenet actually may have been one of Perot Systems first customers, and we have a very, very long relationship with the company.

Our partnership started about 18 years ago, in 1990.  It was a traditional IT outsourcing, which was primarily in the areas of data center hosting and operations, application development, application maintenance and support.

So the outsourcing of our clinical and business IT support to the local hospital through the Perot Systems partnership has worked marvelously.  Those particular individuals are very skilled and they’re seen as being an integral part of the local management teams working hand-in-hand with our CEO’s, our Chief Nursing Officers, and our Chief Financial Officers at the hospital level.

In 1994, American Medical International and National Medical Enterprises, came together to form a company called Tenet Healthcare.  We then needed variable resourcing on a large scale, and Perot provided those resources.

As time went on, around 2000, 2001 we began to look at transformation of our environment to more of a thin client environment, and that required technological innovation capabilities that we took advantage of with our Perot relationship.

When I took over as CEO I determined that I would have to sell half of the hospitals that we owned.  And Perot not only was very accommodating to our need to cut the size of the company basically in half, but also they’ve continued to serve many of the buyers of those hospitals to help insure a seamless transition from Tenet to the new owner.

When hurricane Katrina struck in September – late-August, early-September of 2005 we were the largest operator of hospitals in the Gulf Coast area.  I immediately turned to our friends at Perot Systems for help since they had some experience in disaster preparedness and also evacuating people. And the advice they gave us, not only help us with the evacuation of patients and employees, but they also helped us model effective disaster preparedness behavior, which we now, I think, are quite accomplished in.

In 2006 we renegotiated the contract again to take into account the opportunities available through off-shoring and significantly reduced our cost as a consequence of that. 

And now we also have globalized delivery services, not only in the U.S., but in Mexico, India and the Philippines. 

And Perot Systems has also been a great business partner.  Tenet went through some very difficult times earlier in this decade, many of our business partners became more difficult to deal with, Perot actually was much easier to deal with.

They sat down with us to really understand our needs and our challenges and adapted the business model to help us not only survive but also thrive.