St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton Partners with Nutanix to Ensure Dependable, Efficient Access to Electronic Medical Records Applications, and Scale for Tomorrow’s Needs
A premier academic and research healthcare organization, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton (SJHH) is committed to making a difference in people’s lives through integrated health services and internationally recognized programs. Located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, its threefold mission is to provide dynamic research, revolutionary methods in health sciences education, and the highest standard of clinical care.To improve the agility and efficiency of its network infrastructure, SJHH migrated its healthcare applications such as electronic medical records (EMR) as well as other services to a Nutanix Cloud Platform. Nutanix helps the IT organization scale to support new services and applications more quickly, streamline administrative processes, and consolidate rack space to improve sustainability and control data center costs.
Key Benefits
| Flexible Cloud Platform lets IT add resources to easily scale up EMR and other healthcare applications. | Migration from traditional three-tier environment improves sustainability and reduces costs. | Nutanix Prism helps staff focus on administrative tasks with single, consistent, unified dashboard. |
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“Nutanix makes it easy to scale up the resources we need to support Epic EMR and other key applications quickly and seamlessly, without requiring a large infrastructure investment.”
Challenges
SJHH has earned a national reputation for outstanding patient care and innovative medical and surgical treatments. The Hospital is particularly well known for excellence in respiratory care, surgical services, women’s and infants’ care, robotics, and much more. It is also recognized as a leading academic and research center.
To deliver these services, the SJHH IT staff supports some 8,000 medical professionals, administrators and support staff that span three campuses, as well as numerous satellite sites. Its network and applications also enable the Hospital’s home care, retirement community, and mobile services.
“We are a teaching hospital, and our Information Technology teams support a variety of clinical units, physician practices and research programs by providing access to Epic EMR applications and other resources,” said Kyle Anderson, Senior Enterprise Architect at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. “We also manage the systems that underlie our day-to-day business operations, such as Finance, HR, and Procurement. In total we run a mix of about 400 clinical and non-clinical applications.”
When their legacy platforms came due for refresh, the IT team determined that the current approach would not effectively support its ongoing growth. The Hospital turned to its partners to find a more efficient, flexible infrastructure option.
Solutions
The SJHH IT team considered several solutions and chose Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure as the most versatile, cost-effective solution.
Nutanix enabled the Hospital to migrate its aging hardware-based devices to standardize operations on a secure hyperconverged infrastructure, so it can deliver its critical applications and data to users at scale. Among the most essential clinical applications are its Epic EMR tools, which support patient care and processes like scheduling, registration, and billing as well as specialized systems for doctors, nurses, and lab technicians.
“We have moved the majority of our applications over to Nutanix with at present more than 800 [1] virtual servers running on six Nutanix clusters,” added Scott Lowell, Director, Technology & Cybersecurity at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. “Nutanix gives us the ability to grow at a moderate pace, spread our investments over time, and avoid large capital purchases.”
In the past, the SJHH IT team might have had to purchase an entire disc shelf to turn on enhanced features or expand the environment. With Nutanix, the team can simply purchase additional capacity as required and spin up additional infrastructure on an as-needed basis.
SJHH had considered deploying a hypervisor from another vendor, but the native Nutanix AHV let the organization support most of its applications and services at much less cost.
Customer Outcomes
By consolidating its multiple servers and storage appliances and platforms onto the Nutanix Cloud Platform, SJHH has not only reduced power and rack space, but dramatically improved its business agility.
“The ability to simply spin up new network resources has helped minimize our expenditures a lot,” said Anderson. “We have freed up eight rack space units and reduced power consumption by approximately 50 percent, for more sustainable data center operations. The solution has also proven to be easier for us to manage, requiring fewer people to roll out new services.”
“Under our previous environment, our staff had to manage different platforms and work in a variety of different siloed environments,” explained Lowell. “In order to get something done, you might need to talk to two or three different people. Adding a disc to a server might take five emails and three days. Now, with a single platform, it takes about 30 seconds.”
With centralized administration the IT team have gained better insight into how the solution is being used, so they can better meet users’ needs and adjust to changes faster.
“Our system administrators use Prism Central as their launch point, and it’s a good way to give staff visibility into the environment through a single pane of glass,” said Jeff Dionne, Sr System Administrator at SJHH.
The improved visibility also helps SJHH simplify planning for future application needs.
“It's easier to update our platform to meet requirements based on Epic's Annual Capacity Assessment, because we can go cluster by cluster and see whether we need to upgrade any CPUs, or add RAM or other resources—and plan in advance to scale for new application needs,” said Anderson.
The Nutanix principal architect and engineer played a key role in helping the organization align its technology to its specific processes, and address deployment concerns. Dionne was pleased with the technical support provided by Nutanix, and the solution has proven its reliability for EMR and other key healthcare applications.
“The support from Nutanix through the whole sales and design process, as well as the day-to-day support, has been excellent,” said Dionne. “We have established a very good relationship with Nutanix, and we are counting on it continuing.”
Next Steps
With its flexible Nutanix Cloud Platform in place, the SJHH IT team is considering building on its foundation to support additional applications and services in the near future.
“We are considering Flow Networking to help us automate processes, and we are also evaluating Nutanix DR and database solutions,” said Anderson.
If new needs arise, the Nutanix platform can be scaled up quickly and easily.
“With Nutanix we can add storage in small batches as needed,” said Anderson. “It’s less expensive, and the approval process is much faster.”
Today, SJHH IT organization is confident in its ability to manage continued growth and maintain its sterling research and healthcare reputation.
Learn more at www.nutanix.com
Partner/Customer:
A premier academic and research healthcare organization, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton (SJHH) is committed to making a difference in people’s lives through integrated health services and internationally recognized programs.