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Executive summary:
Canada's health care is publicly funded and the provinces are divided
into different health care entities. Prior to 2002, the province of Saskatchewan
was divided into several districts. In the summer of that year, the province
elected to reorganize the many districts into larger regions in order
to improve the continuum of care. Sunrise Health Region was formed by
combining three separate districts, each with its own IT infrastructure.
The organization needed to efficiently migrate all the different IT environments
to one platform, as well as create a central data center. As if that wasn't
a big enough challenge, Sunrise Health Region, a public entity funded
by the provincial government, has rigid cost constraints affecting every
facet of the business.
After weighing different proposals from several technology companies,
Sunrise decided on a solution that initially included HP ML350 and ML310
servers. Since then, Sunrise has begun converting to the HP ProLiant DL360
and DL380 servers for their central data center. Butch Albrecht, Director
of Information Technology, and his staff take full advantage of HP Systems
Insight Manager (SIM) to manage the environment. In fact, the organization
utilizes HP throughout their entire infrastructure, including HP workstations,
cameras, printers, scanners and network gear. With HP’s help, the
organization’s IT department has transformed a mixed bag of servers
and systems into what Albrecht described as “one of the best IT
environments for health care in the province of Saskatchewan.”
The challenge: a coordinated, synergistic IT environment
Sunrise Health Region is made up of six hospitals, 14 longterm care facilities
and a number of community health centers and clinics. The IT department
has eight people serving 2700 employees. Given the limited financial and
labor resources, managing the entire IT environment would be a tall order
even if everyone in the system were actually on the same system. Albrecht
discusses some of the issues his team faced:
- “It was a very scary situation to take charge of since
management was so difficult.” When Albrecht and his staff
inherited the environment, there was no monitoring of the servers. Nothing
was in place to evaluate disk space utilization or CPU utilization.
Most of the equipment was very old. Drivers and security patches were
in desperate need of updates. “We were constantly having to put
out fires, and we could only get to the big ones,” Albrecht said.
“It was triage.”
- “The server environment was helter skelter and each
of the districts had their own separate applications.” While
Sunrise did have some HP servers, company-wide they were making the
most of a hodge-podge collection of different units from a variety of
different technology companies. They were even using generic workstation
grade boxes as makeshift servers to run some applications. Certainly,
in those cases, performance was poor and stability was non-existent.
- “We lost a server in one of the old districts and were
without financials for more than two weeks.”
Prior to the reorganization and migration to HP, a minor problem could
escalate into a major crisis. One server went down and the financial
system for an entire district was gone: no billing, no invoices, and
no accounts receivable. Albrecht describes the recovery process: “We
found some old backup tapes and some old software and patched together
some old hardware to run it on. We used the older hardware because the
software was so old it wouldn’t run on newer hardware.”
- “Server reliability was affecting the way our physicians
could do their jobs.” Dictation is used by physicians
to record the activities of a patient visit and is then transcribed
into the permanent health record. One day a server hosting that application
failed. The box was not a business class solution, so it was virtually
impossible to find a replacement component.
The solution and success: central data center and unified server
platform across organization
Sunrise Health Region was utilizing some HP servers within the organization,
so a relationship with HP had been established. The strong support HP
had been providing played a big role in winning this significant migration
project. “HP went the extra mile,” said Albrecht, who happens
to be a former employee of a rival technology company. We’re out
in the middle of nowhere, two hours from the nearest airport. Yet when
we needed it, HP was giving us next-day support. We just weren’t
getting the same kind of service from the other technology partners. When
it came time for the full migration, we sent a request for proposal to
all three major players. HP’s proposal was by far the most thorough
and informative.” Albrecht discussed some of the results:
- “Thanks to HP SIM, management of our server environment
is a far cry from what it was a few years ago.” If Sunrise
experiences a hard drive failure at one of the remote sites or at the
data center, the IT department knows about it immediately. “We
have on more than one occasion had SIM send an email alert that I had
a pending
hard disk drive failure,” said Albrecht. “We were able to
respond immediately to that message, investigate the issue, replace
the drive and have it rebuild the RAID over night, without a single
second of downtime. Had we not had the HP tools to alert us, the drive
would have kept spinning until it did fail – probably in the middle
of the day – and would have caused down time for our users. That,
to us, is the true value of HP.”
- “The other thing that HP SIM's version control repository
does for us is that it allows us to create scheduled tasks.” Yvonne
Bueckert, IT administrator, used to spend significant time searching
for BIOS updates, firmware updates, driver updates etc. “I would
schedule downtime
to go in – usually after hours – drive to the site, stick
in a floppy drive, and do the updates,” Bueckert said. “Sometimes
the updates just didn't get done, which presents its own set of risks
and costs. I used to spend weeks getting the servers up to date, only
to start the cycle over again. Now I have Systems Insight Manager setup
to automatically search for, and then download, the
updates for our servers. Then I can schedule the updates to be pushed
and schedule a server reboot during a maintenance window. I can now
do in 30 minutes what used to take several days, and I rarely put in
overtime for updates anymore.”
- “With the HP ProLiant servers, deployment is much faster
and easier. We save a day’s labor per server.”
Since the IT staff is small and provincial funds are so limited, every
man-hour saved is critical. Since committing to the HP ProLiant servers
Albrecht’s team has cut deployment time in half.
- “HP Integrated Lights Out (iLO) technology is saving
us significant time and money.” The Sunrise IT team makes
good use of the HP iLO, saving them travel time and overtime according
to Bueckert. “If I get a red flag, I don’t have to drive
an hour to the location. In fact, I can often take care of matters from
home.”
- “Before we centralized and standardized our servers,
we literally lived in fear of the next crash.” The HP
ProLiant server line has provided Sunrise Health Region a stable, reliable
and scalable solution. “For the 2005 calendar year, the HP ProLiant
servers provided the region 99.99% uptime,” Albrecht said. The
ProLiant solution allows for built-in redundancy at the core components:
power, network, cooling, drives, and memory. Even if a hardware failure
occurs, as long as it doesn't take you down the end user is not affected.
That’s a big deal because as a health region, we’re a 24/7
shop. We absolutely must make sure the clinical data and communication
systems are solid.”
• “We have much better results working with our
clinical reporting software now that it’s on HP ProLiant servers.”
Clinical reporting software is used by people in health records to generate
reports on visit volumes, types of visits, types of diagnoses, demographics,
and diagnostic coding. The information is used to establish health trends
and do analyses. Since moving this software to the HP ProLiant servers,
performance is way up, and we don’t have our user base calling
daily with complaints.
- “HP ProLiant servers make sense on our bottom line as
well.” Sunrise is funded by the provincial government
and cost constraints affect everything, from staffing to equipment to
maintenance. According to Bueckert, HP’s solution meets their
performance and reliability demands without breaking their budget. “For
example, we really like the HP ProLiant DL360 server,” she says.
“With a 1U design and redundancy available for power, network
and drives, the DL360 is a cost-effective, space-saving solution for
us.”
About Sunrise Health Region
Sunrise Health Region of Saskatchewan provides services at six hospital
facilities with 185 acute care beds. Also 14 long-term care facilities,
located in all major communities in the region, provide approximately
878 beds for residents. The region, serving a population of roughly 60,000,
extends from the Qu'Appelle Valley in the south to the edge of the northern
boreal forest, and from the Manitoba border west into the farmlands of
the Saskatchewan prairies. The major care facility in the region is the
Yorkton Regional Health Center, which is also home of the IT department. |
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