The modern healthcare provider must evolve faster than ever before. Small to medium healthcare enterprises are particularly challenged, as they have all the same requirements of larger organizations, but they typically have access to fewer resources to modernize. While these smaller organizations look to adapt by incorporating new technologies, they must ensure their electronic healthcare records (EHR) infrastructure remains highly performant and reliable.
IT leaders are understandably risk averse, as any issue with EHR infrastructure can put lives at risk. As the saying goes, “no one ever got fired for buying the proven solution.” However, traditional infrastructure hasn’t evolved to meet the modern IT organizations demands, and it is often a bottleneck to innovation, both from an operational perspective and a cost perspective. Meanwhile, hyperconverged infrastructure has quickly turned into an enterprise-grade storage solution, and it has reached reliability, availability and performance parity with incumbent technologies, while enabling broader IT transformation.
VMware and Dell recently received certification from MEDITECH for their EHR databases Expanse and Magic for Dell EMC VxRail, a jointly engineered HCI solution. VMware and Dell worked closely with integrator partner Teknicor, an official MEDITECH Collaborative Solution Provider, to complete the certification process. We believe our certification shows the maturity of a software-based HCI solution to meet the exacting demands of the most mission-critical healthcare applications.
vSAN offers healthcare IT an opportunity to accelerate MEDITECH deployments
Many IT organizations use MEDITECH upgrades as an opportunity to refresh their infrastructure, and they’re looking for alternatives to their current solution, which is operationally complex, expensive and too operationally slow for today’s IT organization. IT needs a more flexible infrastructure that can adapt to changing situations, scale rapidly and be quickly adopted by current employees with minimal training. More IT organizations are looking to vSAN powered HCI to meet their needs, and they’re finding HCI can meet their needs while lowering operational complexity, increasing agility and lowering capital costs.
Most importantly, vSAN powered HCI lowers operational costs over traditional fibre channel SAN. HCI fundamentally changes how IT operates, giving unmatched flexibility to teams and agility to grow and adapt the infrastructure to the needs of the business. VMware HCI eliminates some of the most time-consuming storage tasks, while simplifying others through intuitive workflows and a high degree of automation. Systems administrators can take on managing both compute and storage resources, rather than relying on point product specialists. Every systems administrator can learn to manage HCI, and they can learn quickly. Storage provisioning is no longer an operational bottleneck, and IT can flex admins to take on additional tasks beyond managing the Meditech database infrastructure due to the simplicity of HCI.
In addition, HCI is an agile solution that is much easier to scale than existing solutions. Introducing a new array into the data center typically requires months of planning prior to procurement and weeks to deploy. With HCI, rapid growth can be easily accommodated by adding a few servers. VMware Healthcare customers have been able to scale out their EHR infrastructure in just weeks, enabling them to respond to the current healthcare crisis without impacting patient care.
Also, VMware HCI lowers capital costs over traditional infrastructure. Fibre channel networking and an all-flash SAN array can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in up-front costs, plus ongoing maintenance. HCI, by using industry-standard x86 servers with all-flash or all-NVMe storage, can match the performance of dedicated SANs for a fraction of the price. A recent study from Forrester Consulting found a more than 60% reduction in CAPEX based on actual customer experiences. IT can use savings from adopting HCI to investing in other initiatives to improve patient outcomes.
VMware HCI benefits all healthcare applications
VMware HCI is high-performance, general-purpose infrastructure than can be adopted for a variety of use cases beyond the Meditech Expanse and Magic. Key capabilities include integrated file services, Kubernetes integration and enterprise-grade data services, including dedupe and compression and software-based encryption.
Cheyenne Radiology, a medical imaging center that serves patients all over the western U.S., including sites in Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming, use vSAN for picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and virtual desktops (VDI), and they’ve seen “massive cost savings over traditional SAN,” with “power use about a quarter of what it was.” Cheyenne reduced their storage footprint by 20 TB due to dedupe and compression, and they have ample room for data center expansion for the next 5+ years due to the footprint reduction from HCI.
Helse Nord is geographically the largest health authority in Norway. It runs 11 hospitals, serving approximately 480,000 inhabitants from Kirkenes in the east, close to the Russian border, out to the island of Svalbard, west of the Norwegian Sea. Helse Nord employs more than 19,000 people, and is one of four health authorities in Norway, state-owned by the Department of Health. Helse Nord virtualized their compute and storage infrastructure, as well as empowered the employees managing services to manage the infrastructure, reducing job times from weeks to less than an hour. Data center expansion times have been reduced from weeks to hours, thanks to VMware HCI’s automation.
Next Steps
New to HCI? Get familiar with vSAN
For no obligation guidance, contact VMware integration partner Teknicor
See how Baystate Health transformed with vSAN
Read the VxRail datasheet
