Long-term Care and Assisted Living Provider Improves Performance and Uptime of Key Clinical and Business Applications
Overview
St. Ann’s Community has been a trusted partner in helping families care for elders for nearly 150 years. Serving residents throughout upstate New York, its healthcare facilities offer housing, rehab services, and nursing home care. However, as its infrastructure began to show its age, the organization experienced performance issues with key resources that had not been upgraded to the latest software and firmware. The organization was seeking a solution to streamline management, as well as protect sensitive patient healthcare data. With the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform, St. Ann’s Community can replace its separate network devices with a single, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). The unified solution has strengthened security, simplified administration, and saved staff time to focus on other projects.
Key Results
| Enhanced Care |
Unified Management | Strengthened Security |
|---|---|---|
| Enhanced performance and dependability of healthcare delivery with hyperconverged infrastructure | Simplified administrative processes and multiple logins to save time through centralized management | Enabled microsegmentation for improved security and compliance with Nutanix Flow |
As a long-term care and assisted living organization, we need to be able to provide healthcare on a 24x7x365 basis. There’s always somebody here using our equipment and systems. Nutanix delivers the high performance we need, everything is networked correctly, and we have redundancy. The solution has essentially reduced our downtime to zero
Challenge
With a staff of 1000 across three locations, St. Ann’s Community prides itself on delivering superior care to seniors and rehabilitation patients. Like most healthcare organizations, St. Ann’s Community relies on its IT infrastructure to support its most important caregiver and administrative operations.
“We are a senior care community in upstate New York, serving about 1400 elder residents a year at our campuses,” said Aaron Fields, CIO at St. Ann’s Community. “Our infrastructure runs about 60 different applications for all facets of the business, including human resources, finance, electronic medical records, food services, and more.”
St. Ann’s Community supports a mix of cloud-hosted applications, as well as on-premises resources. As the organization has grown, its infrastructure has become more complex and difficult to manage. Fields and his team realized that its traditional administrative processes could no longer keep pace with its growing environment.
“We had a mixture legacy equipment including physical servers that ran operating systems from 2008 and 2012,” said Fields. “As we began incorporating more virtual machines into our environment, we had to deal with multiple logins and different management approaches. It was taking our team a lot of time just for basic tasks. We realized we needed a common way to manage our environment, through a single pane of glass.”
Solution
St. Ann’s Community considered several options and chose to migrate its legacy infrastructure environment to the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform. Fields had worked with Nutanix solutions at a previous company, and was not only comfortable with its capabilities, but its ability to scale and evolve over the long term.
“At the end of the day, what was really important to me was a relationship with the company, knowing I had a partner that we could rely on from a support standpoint after the sale,” said Fields. “It was also great to know that they could offer solutions beyond just the HCI platform.”
St. Ann’s Community purchased the Nutanix solution, including Nutanix AOS, and AHV hypervisor, as well as Nutanix Prism management. The organization also purchased Nutanix Flow to augment security with microsegmentation capabilities, and Nutanix Files for integrated storage.
The new solution was designed to run the organization’s familiar applications smoothly and dependably, so healthcare and administrative staff can enjoy better performance, without needing to learn entirely new applications and processes.
“It was important that our new solution benefit not only my team, but our nurses, physicians, dietary staff and others who have become very efficient at working in certain ways,” said Fields. “We didn’t have the option of shutting down operations for a week to retrain everyone on a new system.”
Customer Outcome
As St. Ann’s Community completes the process of migrating workloads from its previous two-tier legacy environment, Nutanix is saving the organization a tremendous amount of space—and money—in its data center. Bringing all of the organization’s separate components onto Nutanix has freed up two racks of space, for dramatic savings in power, heating, and cooling costs.
Moving multiple devices onto a single virtualized platform also unlocked major savings in administration and troubleshooting, while eliminating costly downtime.
“The automated updates capabilities have dramatically reduced our maintenance time,” said Fields. “We can perform firmware and software updates most anytime during the day, in real time. It’s redundant and dependable, so there’s pretty much no unexpected downtime. In the past, if our system was unavailable to our 1000 employees for a couple hours, the result was thousands of hours of lost productivity.”
Keeping its most critical operations like medical records and administrative applications running smoothly has translated into a better experience for patients, residents, and their families as well.
“People notice when staff are frustrated, and when they aren’t,” said Fields. “If we can ensure that our employees have less to worry about, in a stressful job during a global pandemic, everyone benefits.”
The solution has also enabled Fields and his team to strengthen security with Nutanix Flow, which provides application-centric visibility and advanced microsegmentation for protection from network threats.
“Our CEO, Michael McRae is a great advocate for cybersecurity, and we have implemented Nutanix Flow to help us enforce security policies on certain inter-server traffic,” said Fields. “Flow has allowed us to dig in a little bit deeper into what the traffic's doing and make sure that we are compliant with HIPAA and other requirements.”
Next Steps
One of the most appealing qualities of Nutanix for St. Ann’s Community was the platform’s flexibility and expandability. Fields and his team are evaluating Nutanix Files to consolidate its storage systems and make records more accessible.
“We want to take our old, disjointed shared company drive and move in the new direction,” said Fields. “We have clinical imaging files and a vast array of Excel files on our network. We’re doing our due diligence to understand how people work, apply best practices, and move the content to a brand-new platform that's faster and more reliable.”
With its Nutanix Cloud Platform in place, St. Ann’s Community is confident that it will continue to deliver a superior long-term healthcare experience, while staying prepared for new challenges on the horizon.