Concerns over the quality of patient care, rising IT costs, and healthcare reform have healthcare IT teams looking for a better way to deliver services to clinicians and patients. Many industries need a reliable, agile and efficient software-defined data center, but perhaps none more than the healthcare industry that is in the business of saving lives.
vSAN has become the go-to HCI solution for more than 10,000 organizations worldwide looking for a secure, cost-effective infrastructure. For the healthcare industry, vSAN also means accelerated delivery of new patient services, increased support of end-user compute models, and improved reliability of critical applications, like electronic health records (EHR). The end result is better, more efficient care for their patients, ultimately saving lives in the process.
Cerner Uses vSAN to Provide Value-Driven Care
There’s a saying at Cerner: Healthcare is too important to stay the same. This internal motto very much dictated their digital transformation efforts and adoption of vSAN. Using vSAN hyper-converged storage and mobile solutions, Cerner was able to reduce costs and risk to ensure their healthcare customer environments are as secure as possible while improving clinical workflow delivery. This allowed them to transition from volume-based care to a value-driven care model.
“The value-driven care model is really around where population health can help the patients be more proactive with the health plan to get them in the right direction,” Josh Rodgers, director of infrastructure, said. vSAN empowered Cerner to operationalize and improve efficiencies on the clinical side, leading to improved physician experience and patient outcomes. “Clinicians want ease of use making decisions that are life-threatening to the patient,” he said. “Think of a medical network access control center, where we can actually protect the infusion pump where the vitals monitor in a different way than we’ve done before. That’s the kind of forethought and future we’re looking toward.”
Union Hospital: A Technologically-Advanced Healthcare Provider
Take, for instance, Union Hospital, a not-for-profit healthcare system headquartered in Terre haute, IN comprised of more than 20 hospitals and clinics and servicing more than 3,000 patients. Chris Elliott, network systems consultant at Union Hospital, explains that their previous storage resources were rapidly running out. “There really wasn’t any more horsepower to get out of the system,” he said. “We were hitting a wall.” They decided to adopt vSAN in order to drastically improve their critical database performance.
Since using vSAN, Union Hospital has reduced database latency by 200%, cut their reporting time from an average of 30 minutes down to just five, achieved 3-6x faster application launch times and increased their virtual desktop/server sessions by 50%. By simplifying their storage solutions for virtual environments with vSAN, Union Hospital has been recognized by Hospitals & Health Networks as a “Most Wired Hospital” five years running. Union Hospital runs Healthcare Centricity EMR, GE Healthcare Centricity PACS, and Siemens Soarian Clinicals on vSAN.
When it came to providing higher levels of patient care, Baystate Health utilized vSAN’s hyper-converged infrastructure solutions to do just that, while cutting their IT expenses in the process. They were able to build a new data center at an affordable cost for their rapidly increasing patient data that their old system could not accommodate.
By choosing VMware vSAN, Baystate Health saved around $3.5 million in data center construction costs and improved upon the resiliency of their old system with an always-on, highly available virtualized data center. So, how does this translate to improved patient care? According to CIO of Baystate Health Joel Vengco, “with data centrally managed, risks are reduced and HIPAA compliance is simpler, which is huge.” Employing vSAN ultimately gives Baystate Health’s client base peace of mind that their sensitive patient data is safe, secure, accurate and easily accessible by all of their physicians to uphold a high quality of care. Now Bay State Health’s Electronic Medical Records Systems run on vSAN.
Conclusion
Efficiency, data management, security and a seamless user experience are all necessities for most businesses, especially those taking care of human lives. HCI powered by vSAN has proven more than up to the task of delivering infrastructure and data center solutions that bolster the performance of the healthcare industry and result in better quality of care for the patients entrusting their well-being to healthcare providers utilizing this technology.
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