Press Releases

National Blood Authority Stems $10 Million Blood Wastage with Nutanix

Enterprise cloud platform empowers medical professionals in saving even more lives

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. – March 1, 2016Nutanix today announced it is helping the National Blood Authority (NBA) save lives by ensuring it can easily access crucial data to accurately and quickly supply blood to Australians. NBA delivers four million units of blood, valued at A$1.2 billion annually.

The NBA is a statutory agency that relies on a number of applications to provide blood safely and securely. To ensure it could sustainably operate its large, life-saving network in the future, the NBA identified the need to upgrade its IT to give employees uninterrupted availability to resources at anytime, anywhere.

The NBA replaced its traditional storage area network (SAN) with the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform because Nutanix provided a simple, scalable and easy-to-manage data centre platform that performs invisibly. The solution was designed and installed by Canberra ICT services provider Qirx to support a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) running critical blood management and patient registry systems.

The implementation has empowered NBA employees with the ability to log on to the agency’s systems at home, in laboratories, at remote clinics and while on the road. With readily-available resources, staff have enhanced client services as the most up-to-date inventory data can be used on demand. This has resulted in significant process efficiencies and less blood wasted. Previously, clinical and scientific staff were forced to spend hours, and in some cases weeks, preparing for of out-of-office trips and then the data was often out of date by the time it was required.

“We needed a way to give staff the most up-to-date information at all times, whether they’re accessing our main blood management system named BloodNet, the Australian Bleeding Disorders Registry, or any other application,” said Peter O’Halloran, Chief Information Officer (CIO), NBA. “Nutanix provided a reliable means to make this possible; if we didn’t have the technology, there would be an increase in cost of about $10 million per annum to cover blood wastage – that means at least 20,000 extra blood donors would need to be called in every year.”

In addition to better outcomes for the healthcare sector, the Nutanix infrastructure has led to significant cost savings for the NBA. Using the Nutanix solution for its VDI, staff are, on average, saving 34 minutes per week on log-in times alone. This, in combination with reduced document preparation and aggregation times, has resulted in a 100 percent return on investment (ROI) within the first five months of the implementation.

As the NBA’s VDI requirements for application availability expand, it is able to add more virtual machines using the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor, and manage the full environment through the Nutanix Prism single-pane-view console. These capabilities are being supported by Qirx and Nutanix, which are helping the agency to identify further means of improving use cases in order to maximise value from the infrastructure.

“The NBA runs a life-saving operation, putting it under immense pressure to deliver blood to Australians on a very strict timeline,” said Wayne Neich, Managing Director Australia and New Zealand, Nutanix. “Using Nutanix, the NBA has further enhanced its employees’ ability to deliver blood on time by ensuring they have constant access to all the critical information concerning the blood supplies. That means staff can walk into a hospital with full access to everything in the office, and collaborate with doctors, nurses and scientists to treat patients effectively.”

About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making infrastructure invisible so that IT can focus on the applications and services that power their business. Companies around the world use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to bring one-click application management and mobility across public, private and distributed edge clouds so they can run any application at any scale with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. The result is organizations that can rapidly deliver a high-performance IT environment on demand, giving application owners a true cloud-like experience. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

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