Nutanix Cloud Platform Improves Access to Patient Health Records —Increasing Medical Staff Productivity and the Quality of Patient Care
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
CHALLENGES
- Aging 3-tier infrastructure was due for a refresh
- Needed to improve uptime for essential EHR application
- Wanted to simplify scaling and infrastructure management
SOLUTION
Nutanix Cloud Platform:
APPLICATIONS
- MEDITECH Electronic Health Records (EHR) Client Server 6.0
- All Enterprise Apps (e.g., Kronos, Exchange, SQL, AD)
- All Ancillary Clinical Apps (e.g., Dr First, Access Forms)
- VMware Horizon View virtual desktops
- Imprivata Single Sign On (SSO)
BUSINESS BENEFITS
By moving its MEDITECH EHR system to Nutanix, Baker County Medical Services (BCMS) has been able to streamline IT management, simplify scaling, and reduce data center footprint. With greater uptime and more reliable access to medical records, healthcare provider productivity and the quality of patient care have both improved significantly.
We used to have outages on our MEDITECH electronic health records system on a regular basis. Since moving everything over to Nutanix, we have achieved 99.99% uptime for our life-critical EHR service.
Ernie Waller, IT Director, Baker County Medical Services
CHALLENGE
Baker County Medical Services (BCMS) was established in 1993 as a not-for-profit charity corporation. Its mission is to provide the highest quality of care in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. Based in MacClenny, Florida, the BCMS organization provides medical, nursing, acute care, and related services to all residents in the Baker County region – regardless of their ability to pay.
BCMS was relying on a traditional 3-tier infrastructure stack, consisting of Dell EMC VNX storage systems and Cisco UCS servers. The healthcare organization is using MEDITECH’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system to manage its confidential patient records and hospital administrative data.
“Our ability to deliver quality health services to our constituents is 100% dependent on the reliability of our EHR solution,” stated Ernie Waller, Baker County Medical Services’ IT director. “But complexity associated with managing 3-tier multiple vendor architectures contributed to less than acceptable service levels. Whenever the MEDITECH system went down, our physicians and healthcare providers were unable to access health records in a timely manner, impacting their ability to provide quality care to our patients.”
SOLUTION
Waller started looking for a more suitable platform for the MEDITECH EHR application late last year. After evaluating several solutions, he made the decision to migrate from the 3-tier infrastructure to the Nutanix Cloud Platform and AHV hypervisor. “Nutanix is the only HCI platform that is currently certified for the MEDITECH EHR application,” noted Waller. “That was a huge factor in our decision. We also really liked that Nutanix is an ‘all-in-one’ solution that is easy to manage and includes high-performance storage.”
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
An Easy Migration
Waller and his team used Nutanix Move to migrate from the 3-tier environment to the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Move automates all repetitive and cumbersome steps required to manually migrate or rebuild VMs in an AHV environment. The Nutanix migration tool also delivers the best practice configurations needed for optimal VM performance—saving significant time for BCMS’s IT team, lowering the cost of migrating systems manually and the need to rely on a costly professional services engagement.
Nutanix simplifies deployment and administration of the MEDITECH solution by eliminating both Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) and Storage Area Networking (SAN), while providing MEDITECH Backup Facilitator (MBF) integration. Even during the conversion to Nutanix, the end-user experience remained steady. “Moving the scanned images from MEDITECH Scan to Nutanix Files was very easy,” added Waller. “We did it during the day without any downtime.”
Running MEDITECH on Nutanix
BCMS is now running its MEDITECH EHR solution on the Nutanix platform. 90% of the organization’s physicians and healthcare workers access the MEDITECH solution daily using their VMware View desktop devices.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform is the only hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that includes end-to-end support for MEDITECH’s File Servers, which are the core EHR databases where patient data resides. Nutanix delivers high performance and the highest level of patient data protection, exceeding MEDITECH’s performance SLAs. The HCI platform improves care provider productivity and significantly decreases risks with one-click operations and non-disruptive life cycle management. In addition, Nutanix enhances patient privacy and data security with built-in security features, including data-at-rest encryption and micro segmentation.
30% Faster Desktops
BCMS is now running all MEDITECH VMs on Nutanix. “We used an application named Conducive that enhances MEDITECH system performance by performing OS RAM caching,” explained Waller. “Together with Nutanix, the combined solution increased the performance of our desktop clients by over 30%.”
Higher Availability
“We used to have system-wide outages on our MEDITECH health records system on a regular basis,” admitted Waller. “Since moving everything over to Nutanix, we have achieved 99.99% uptime for our life-critical EHR service.”
Simplified Management and Non-Disruptive Upgrades
“We really like the functionality of the Nutanix maintenance mode,” said Waller. “All administrative processes are done in the background, so the MEDITECH application is unaffected. You simply can’t do that with 3-tier infrastructure. The Nutanix upgrades have been amazingly easy and non-disruptive as well.”
Easier Backups and Improved DR
“Backups are traditionally very difficult on the MEDITECH environment,” explained Waller. “Disaster recovery is also much easier. With Nutanix, we don’t have to deal with a separate cloud service or a third-party DR application anymore. By using the Nutanix ‘all-in-one’ solution, we retain better control of our confidential data, and it’s much more cost effective.”
Great Technical Support
“The quality of Nutanix support has been exceptional,” Waller acknowledged. “They have been able to answer all of my questions quickly and provide guidance on best practices when asked. I honestly couldn’t ask for any more from a support organization.”
NEXT STEPS
“Nutanix has built a very dependable platform for our electronic healthcare record application,” concluded Waller. “It improves our healthcare providers’ productivity and significantly decreases risks with its one-click operations, non-disruptive lifecycle management, increased patient privacy, and better data security. By moving to Nutanix, our IT staff can now focus on improving patient care instead of just managing our IT operations.”