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Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC) is a non-profit organization that works toward meeting the needs and challenges for more than 10,000 Alaska Natives in Interior Alaska. TCC has a membership of Native governments from 42 Interior Alaska communities. The full Board of Directors includes 42 representatives selected by the village councils of member communities.
The need for a calendar solution to coordinate and manage travel
TCC serves the interior region of Alaska, covering an area of 235,000 square miles. Most of the villages they serve are not connected to the road system. With over 12,000 patients per month, TCC coordinates a high volume of patient travel medical appointments when care cannot be provided in the patient’s local region. This includes scheduling ground transportation, flights, appointments, and housing.
TCC engaged Mphasis Silverline and Salesforce in 2024 to streamline their Medicaid travel process with Salesforce’s Health Cloud and Experience Cloud. This enabled travel coordinators to track and manage travel requests in Salesforce and clinical staff to view and submit travel requests.
TCC quickly discovered that they needed a calendar solution that would allow them to visualize and coordinate times and dates for flights, ground transportation, hotels, and appointments. They were initially using Salesforce reports, which were not conducive to managing day-to-day operations, so they took the information out of Salesforce and put it in external spreadsheets, doubling their work.
CalendarAnything makes it easy to take action
Another major pain point was that TCC didn’t have a way to look at the data they needed in order to act quickly. For example, a flight would be canceled from one of their remote villages into Anchorage, a regular occurrence due to harsh weather conditions. They didn’t have a way to know what patients were on that flight and communicate with them about the next flight they could get on.
They also didn’t have a way to notify the hotel that the patient missed the flight and would be coming in on another date, resulting in a no-show fee that put them in bad standing with the hotel. The same happened with appointments and no-show fees from the doctors. These fees were adding up because they didn’t understand where their patients were in time.
TCC implemented CalendarAnything in June of 2025, giving them the visualization they needed. They now have a calendar that shows all patients that are going into a particular city and staying at specific hotels, and they can quickly take action by clicking the calendar item to go to the Salesforce record. “It’s now much easier to see who needs to be moved between facilities and we can make better judgement calls and allocation of our facilities,” said Jennifer Eden, Executive Director, Quality & Development, at TCC.
If the FAA roster says a flight has been cancelled, they can type in the flight number, see exactly which patients are on that flight, and start doing their due diligence to rebook appointments and hotels. They estimate that this will result in $50-$100K+ a year, and they’re already seeing those savings. “We now have more runway to mitigate overbooking and double-booking, resulting in significant cost savings,” said Eden.
Discovering new use cases to optimize processes
With CalendarAnything, TCC employees can do administrative work without double-entering data, saving them approximately six hours a week. That is only going to accelerate as they find additional use cases and different ways to streamline processes. “We now have cleaner data overall, resulting in operational improvement on data points that were not previously available,” said Scott Thacker, Patient Travel and Lodging Manager, at TCC.
Their engagement with Mphasis Silverline Managed Services has proven especially valuable, and they’ve already uncovered several new CalendarAnything use cases since initial implementation.
Satisfied with how effectively they could now manage travel requests, TCC wanted a way to see when their providers were on call, as well as work hours and PTO schedules of internal employees. CalendarAnything collaborated with the Mphasis Silverline Managed Services team to build out a full approval process for scheduling PTO as well as an object with different fields to capture which providers were on call for that week.
TCC now has a holistic view of every schedule for internal and external on-call providers in one view, as well as an approval process to put in PTO requests and track if they’re approved. This calendar is open to their internal team, allowing everyone to be on the same page about who’s in office and who’s not.
