Guaranteeing Performance and Availability for Electronic Health Records (EHR) EHR Solution Brief JPS Healthcare Case Study

Guaranteeing Performance and Availability for Electronic Health Records (EHR) EHR Solution Brief JPS Healthcare Case Study

SOLUTION BRIEF: EHR FOR HEALTHCARE Guaranteeing Patient- Critical Electronic Health Record (EHR) Application Infrastructure Performance with VirtualWisdom4 Healthcare organizations rely on instant data access to make life-saving decisions. Patient record availability at all times is not just a regulatory requirement it s critical to delivering quality care. Healthcare IT managers must maintain a highly available and high performance application infrastructure to run the clinical applications that support critical patient services. Healthcare in Transition Today s healthcare IT environment undergoes continual change resulting from the ongoing push towards virtualization, adoption of new technologies, explosive data growth and regulatory requirements. The transition from paper to digital patient documentation drastically increases the number of electronic health records (EHRs), driving the need for more efficient ways to store, manage and share them. While all this information is being created and stored, it must flow throughout the healthcare organization and between stakeholders throughout multiple organizations to ensure timely and quality care delivery. Healthcare applications are inherently data and I/O intensive. With limited visibility into storage area network (SAN) I/O performance, healthcare IT managers face significant challenges ensuring the performance and availability of clinical applications from leading providers including EPIC, Cerner, Siemens, GE and Mckesson. Whether retrieving critical patient data such as x-rays and scans, or collecting and integrating new data from traditional clinical sources such as diagnostic centers, labs, and pharmacy benefit management (PBM) organizations a healthcare providers ability to diagnose patients, deliver test results and prescribe treatment and medications is significantly impacted by poor EHR application response times caused by the supporting IT infrastructure. WHY HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS CHOOSE VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS Our IT team used to spend days even weeks trouble-shooting the root cause for outages which affected our users and made them uncomfortable with the availability of key applications. With VirtualWisdom in place we were able to be proactive and improve the performance and availability of our electronic health records applications and improve the service levels delivered to our care providers. -Director, Infrastructure Management Group, National Healthcare Provider Proactively identify and address infrastructure problems before they impact clinical workflow. Eliminate the risk of unplanned outages and performance slow-downs when virtualizing patient-critical EHR systems. Improve healthcare application performance to ensure fast reliable access to medical records. Maintain, improve and prove SLA compliance, joint commission audits and HIPAA regulations. Optimize SAN, server and storage port utilization to avoid unnecessary purchases, and reallocate 50% CapEx savings to fund strategic healthcare initiatives. Reduce trouble tickets by up to 80%, and re-allocate OpEx savings to patient care initiatives.

Proactively Monitor and Manage Healthcare Application Infrastructure Comprehensive, real-time measurement of the entire application infrastructure enables healthcare IT performance teams to proactively manage their endto-end systems, quickly identify root causes of issues, and detect emergent issues before they become problems that impact care delivery. This definitive level of visibility also helps teams optimize resource utilization and prevent unnecessary purchases. This in turn significantly reduces the amount of resources required to troubleshoot I/O problems and eliminate the risk associated with deploying clinical applications in virtualized environments. Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom4 Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) platform is the only real-time, end-to-end application infrastructure monitoring and optimization solution that helps improve application response times while reducing latency. This enables IT teams to drive the highest performance and availability at the optimal cost and lowest risk for their existing application infrastructures helping to eliminate overprovisioning while at the same time eliminating risk. Through the definitive insights that VirtualWisdom4 delivers, teams are able to quickly and easily identify root causes for latency and bottlenecks, enhance clinical work flow, and ensure reliable and timely access to medical records for improved quality of care. infrastructure in and unbiased manner. Teams can quickly and accurately troubleshoot technical issues, and minimize the number of help desk calls and trouble tickets by 80%. With fewer issues to deal with, IT performance teams can focus on their strategic initiatives and establish a highly reliable and HIPAA compliant application infrastructure. Operational expenditure (OpEx) savings can then be directed to patient care initiatives. CapEx savings that VirtualWisdom4 monitoring capabilities enable, complement IT efficiencies and OpEx savings, which can both be re-allocated to clinical work flow enhancements that improve care provider services. By optimizing virtualization investments, IT performance teams are able to eliminate over-provisioning and reduce hardware costs by 50%. VirtualWisdom finds underutilized resources, enables load rebalancing, and alleviates the need to purchase servers, storage or switch ports that end up being underutilized. Some healthcare organizations are considering cloud solutions as a way to lower IT costs and make critical data more accessible to patients and caregivers. The VirtualWisdom4 IPM platform can help accelerate and de-risk the move to private or hybrid cloud environments, enabling greater IT agility and predictable spend. Healthcare organizations looking at private cloud solutions will dramatically benefit from adding monitoring capabilities for tracking SLAs and meeting compliance requirements. Comply with Healthcare Regulations The VirtualWisdom4 IPM platform helps address the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Joint Commission, and European Union Data Directive requirements for business continuity. Visually intuitive dashboards and actionable analytics provide accurate details and definitive insights required by IT performance and service delivery teams including summary reporting needed by management. These metrics and analytics also support regulatory compliance by validating adherence to external requirements as well as internal SLAs. VirtualWisdom s comprehensive real-time and historical reporting provide the management oversight needed to build strong foundations for service reliability. Improve Quality of Care Many healthcare organizations are struggling to implement innovative technologies like EHR because of the high cost of deploying and maintaining highly virtualized and complex application infrastructures. This directly impacts quality of care and puts patientcritical systems at risk. VirtualWisdom4 s ability to monitor, report, trend and diagnose performance and availability issues in a reliable and scalable way is essential for IT performance teams that need to guarantee reliability when it comes to clinical work flow and access to patient data in service of quality care delivery. Enable IT Efficiencies A primary benefit of VirtualWisdom4 is the ability to proactively monitor the end-to-end application Sales sales@virtualinstruments.com 1.888.522.2557 Training training@virtualinstruments.com Website virtualinstruments.com 01/2015 Virtual Instruments. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. VirtualWisdom, Virtual Instruments, SANInsight, Virtual Instruments Certified Associate, Virtual Instruments Certified Professional, and Virtual Instruments University are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries.

JPS Health Network Virtual Instruments helps JPS Health Network reduce infrastructure costs Company Overview In October 1877, future Fort Worth, Texas mayor John Peter Smith deeded five acres of land at what is now 1500 South Main Street to provide a place where individuals from Fort Worth and Tarrant County could have the best of medical care. In 1906, a hospital affiliated with the Fort Worth Medical College was opened in Fort Worth, and the foundation for JPS Health Network was laid. Today, JPS Health Network continues to serve the needs of the families in Tarrant County, working to improve individual health and access to highquality health care. The facilities have grown to include a 567-bed hospital that is attached to a Patient Care Pavilion a five-story acute care facility, along with an outpatient care center and a dedicated facility for psychiatric services. IT Environment and Role Health Network s Tarrant County main datacenter has a 200+ terabyte SAN growing at over 40% annually connected to application servers through a Brocade fabric supporting 300 fibre channel SAN ports. To optimize budget and resources, JPS uses both VMware server virtualization and storage virtualization. Their storage array comprised of two modular systems virtualized behind it and another standalone modular array. There are now 3 full-time staff managing all storage and backup related tasks for the entire JPS organization, supporting all office functions like email and billing, and the ongoing migration to online patient records. Challenges and Concerns One of the key challenges was in maintaining traditional high service levels in the face of 40% annual data growth, while keeping costs down. With a growing number of ports and disks, lack of standardization amongst vendor-supplied tools, and an inability to do predictive problem avoidance, it was becoming a challenge to manage the SAN. CASE STUDY Challenges Maintain service levels, while controlling costs Improve effectiveness of existing IT staff, while growing data 50%/year Help prepare IT department for bringing more mission critical applications on-line Solution Began deploying Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom and professional services Customer Benefits Discovery of SAN related problems before they could cause outages Increased productivity of existing staff Provides quicker responses from storage vendors by providing insightful VirtualWisdom reports To-date, we ve used VirtualWisdom to find and resolve four problems before they would have eventually caused an outage. We re using it as an additional person on our team. Once you have it, you see a big value.

With an increasingly digitized patient-facing environment,, Storage Team Lead at JPS states matter-of-factly that JPS IT systems can t really be down at all. Solution Evaluation Like many IT shops, JPS was challenged with tight budgets and with getting more performance from existing resources. To do this, IT knew it must be proactive; it had to avoid problems and anticipate issues before users and application owners were affected. The only way to do this without dramatically increasing the staff size was to find some way to proactively automate the monitoring and analysis of the effect of the SAN on application availability. According to, All the storage vendors will help you to fix problems, if you can identify the problem, and that s the trick. JPS wanted: I think every person in the world should buy TAPs. It s like the valve for checking tire pressure on your car. A predictive analysis tool, something that could act like their eyes and ears to alert to issues before they become serious problems. Something to help prevent outages. A reporting mechanism that could take a deeper look than vendor-supplied tools, something at the hardware level to find things that might cause application problems. With a light staff, JPS couldn t spend time watching every SAN component. Centralized monitoring, to accommodate a move from a primary only to a primary + backup site. An agnostic, vendor-neutral solution that would enable them to avoid finger pointing and assist the vendors to offer better advice. The UI is very nice; not complicated at all. With the dashboard, you see things in real time that you wouldn t otherwise know about. A partner relationship with a flexible business model. A complementary solution to existing vendor-oriented monitoring solutions. (JPS uses storage-vendor specific tools to manage their storage assets (dynamic provisioning, capacity utilization, etc.). Benefits of the Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom Solution Previous to the VirtualWisdom deployment, JPS would have to wait until a problem was reported, perhaps even in the form of an outage. In a typical scenario, they would look at individual components, system logs, etc. and do process of elimination troubleshooting. With VirtualWisdom, problems were identified much earlier, before they became serious, and root cause analysis became more efficient. For instance, with VirtualWisdom, a problem the server team thought was SCSI controller related turned out to be an HBA issue, saving potentially days of wasted investigative work. I believe that we ve saved nearly $100,000 per storage array by understanding performance bottlenecks better and not having to buy extra cache on these arrays.

Why use VI? Specific Virtual Instruments benefits to JPS Health Network include: Finds problems before they affect application performance or availability Saves CAPEX by enabling a better understanding of true bottlenecks and potentially reducing the need to add hardware Helps in communicating with our server team and our storage vendors. JPS can send them VirtualWisdom reports and ask for their advice No impact on users of application; a non-intrusive solution Helps validate tiering strategies need a neutral third-party in order to validate tiering, to help match application requirements with the total SAN infrastructure; helps eliminate rules of thumb planning Sales sales@virtualinstruments.com 1.888.522.2557 Training training@virtualinstruments.com Website virtualinstruments.com 8/2014 Virtual Instruments. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. VirtualWisdom, Virtual Instruments, SANInsight, Virtual Instruments Certified Associate, Virtual Instruments Certified Professional, and Virtual Instruments University are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries.