Mary Washington Healthcare Uses Private Cloud to Clarify Focus on Patient Care

(Contributions from BreAnne Buehl, Katrina Desrosiers, Erin O’Quinn, Cameron Sturdevant)

Mary Washington Healthcare, based in Fredericksburg, Virginia, is a leading healthcare provider in the region. Mary Washington Healthcare is focused on enhancing patient care through smart investments in technology. By adopting VMware Cloud Foundation, the healthcare organization is transforming IT operations to improve patient care and the experience for healthcare teams working with patients.

Watch the Customer Story Video

Read the Customer Story: Mary Washington Healthcare Uses Private Cloud to Clarify Focus on Patient Care

Mary Washington Healthcare transformed its technology infrastructure to enhance patient care with private cloud by automating manual IT tasks, improving capacity prediction, implementing chargebacks for IT resources, and proactively addressing issues. As a result, the IT team has operated more efficiently and effectively, leading to streamlined operations that ultimately benefit patient care.

Here are a few excerpts from the case study:

“VMware Cloud Foundation enables us to do more with less. We have the same team, but we’re able to cover so much more,” says Michael Miller, Technical Architect, Mary Washington Healthcare

“We can now show our application analysts exactly how a resource is being used and how much it costs,” Miller says. “From a cost and resource perspective, we can be more certain in planning new applications.”

Operational visibility allows Mary Washington Healthcare to get ahead of IT issues before they impact staff and patients, reducing the strain on the help desk and shifting teams out of fire-fighting mode. “The entire mindset is now forward-facing,” says Miller.

VMware Cloud Foundation Operations has transformed capacity planning and management. Where previously the guiding concern was not to under-provision—inevitably leading to over-provisioning—today, Mary Washington Healthcare can make accurate assessments of resources used. “We can now show our application analysts exactly how a resource is being used and how much it costs,” Miller says. “From a cost and resource perspective, we can be more certain in planning new applications.” The capacity needed for one project, he adds, was reduced by 70 percent with insight from VMware Cloud Foundation Operations.

Operations improvements with better automation are happening across the entire organization. Password updates, patch compliance and change certificates—tasks that used to take days—are now completed in minutes.

Already a VMware vSphere and vSAN user, Miller says the adoption of VMware Cloud Foundation is confirmation of a deeper, more strategic engagement between Mary Washington Healthcare and Broadcom.

“Once we went live with VMware Cloud Foundation and the included NSX networking capability, we brought in the overlay network, which added to the performance of our VMs. I’ve noticed the traffic has been a lot better with that.”

“Within our environment we already had vSAN and we were planning in the future to start having different policies for different workloads. With VMware Cloud Foundation, which includes vSAN, we’ve been able to really start understanding it more. This has changed a lot, and now we can utilize it to the best of its ability.”

“The more we learned about VMware Cloud Foundation, the more we saw it could address all our problems. It was the desired single pane-of-glass, and a route to new levels of automation. With VMware Cloud Foundation, we’ve been able to really start understanding the technology more. This has changed a lot, and now we can utilize it to the best of its ability.”

Building a private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation has allowed Mary Washington Healthcare to go beyond utilizing a technology provider. The improvements enable them to continue their commitment to delivering top-notch services to patients across their hospitals and community.