Case Study

Regional Healthcare Organization Accelerates New Data Center with Visibility

Regional Healthcare Organization Accelerates New Data Center with Visibility

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Move to ACI delayed due to lack of visibility to identify all applications and their dependencies
  • Lacked effective solution to monitor remote hospitals
The Solution
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
  • InfiniStreamNG™ appliance and vSTREAM™ virtual appliance
  • nGenius® Unified Communication Collector
The Results
  • Accelerated move to ACI with NETSCOUT® for discovery of apps and their dependencies
  • Improved staff and patient experience with end-to-end visibility from data center to remote hospitals

Customer Profile

This large, regional health care organization has grown organically and through acquisitions over recent years to currently supporting over 10,000 employees serving their communities through an integrated health system that includes several hospitals and surgery centers along with over 70 other types of care locations.

The IT team has aggressive goals to support the organization’s growth and position it for future digital transformations and technology enhancements. These include: transitioning to Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), introducing new applications, updating their existing application services, and where necessary, growing bandwidth to meet the ever-expanding demands of the staff and patients this healthcare organization serves. To say their network and applications are critical to patient care would be an understatement!

The Challenge

As the IT staff was working the first planned project, a strategic move to a Cisco ACI environment, the timelines were being impacted due to the lack of visibility to completely identify all the applications and their dependencies that needed to be moved. The problem was further compounded by the complexity and inefficiencies created by multiple existing tools that were incomplete and disconnected, making it difficult for the teams to have common measurements, processes and reporting.

The teams decided they needed to re-examine their network monitoring system and upgrade to the latest technologies to handle their requirements now and be positioned for future enhancements. They planned to implement high-quality network and application monitoring from their remote hospitals that have small VMware clusters, and deploy a new VoIP system. This brought up another challenge; ensuring that any solution they were going to implement met the needs of all the IT teams, i.e. Citrix, Voice, database, server, help-desk etc.

Solution in Action

The entire IT team was involved in establishing the service assurance requirements and vendor evaluations, and at the conclusion were in agreement that the NETSCOUT Service Assurance platform was the right solution for their enterprise-wide needs. Unlike the existing tools or adding more multiple point solutions, NETSCOUT proved to be the best approach to gain the visibility and scalability they needed to move forward.

Since much of the healthcare organization’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data passes through Citrix, the initial focus was to optimize performance of Citrix and its eco-system. With nGeniusONE and the InfiniStreamNG, powered by Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology, they gained end-to-end visibility into the performance of the integrated, Citrix-enabled, application environment. They deployed NETSCOUT vSTREAMS at the remote hospital locations to leverage the full power of ASI, delivering cost-effective, pervasive visibility from these sites.

In preparation for the new VoIP system, one of the first steps the Voice team planned was to implement the nGenius Unified Communication Collector to optimize the new service rollout and minimize any negative impact to call quality.

The Results

The IT team was immediately able to identify all the apps and their dependencies, which accelerated the move to ACI. As an added bonus, they were able to proceed with fewer resources than planned on the project; saving money by using nGeniusONE discovery with service dependency mapping.

With full visibility from the remote hospitals, the organization achieved the goal of end-to-end visibility and are able to quickly identify the source of network issues, leading to reduced Mean-Time-To-Resolve (MTTR). All of this helps improve the staff and patient experience.

Planning and coordination of each of the projects has improved with all IT teams using the same tool. Each team can now troubleshoot faster with the same source of information / evidence and share the results without having to switch between disparate tools. They share common metrics, processes and reporting, leaving more time to focus on the projects that will help the organization continue to grow and ensure patient experience is as high as possible.