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Blog

Nick Turnbull, Marathon’s VP of international sales explored the importance of ensuring that hospitals and healthcare providers suitably protect themselves for the possible failure of their IT systems to minimise disruption in a recent article published in HES magazine. An excerpt from the article is below. For more information on this topic, you can also download our recent white paper "Finding a Cure for Downtime: 7 Steps to Reducing Downtime in Healthcare Information Systems."

The management of administrative, financial and clinical aspects of a hospital rely on continuous uptime. Every single minute of downtime can jeopardise compliance, revenue and most importantly the health and wellbeing of patients. Downtime is a risk no hospital or healthcare provider can afford to take.

Hospital equipment and systems are designed for a variety of tasks, some keep track of the administrative issues of a hospital, or look after clinical information systems that concentrate on patient-related and clinical-state related data such as the electronic patient record (EPR) and the monitoring of life support machines, MRI scanners, etc. The ensured access to all IT systems is paramount for the smooth running of a hospital and to ensure quality patient care.

EPRs and the need for centralised patient information have seen regular attention in the media recently. EPR systems have the potential to bring huge benefits to patients and they are being implemented in health systems across the developed world. Storing and sharing health information electronically can help to speed up clinical communication, reduce the number of errors, and assist doctors in diagnosis and treatment. Equally, this kind of electronic data can also have vast potential to improve the quality of healthcare audit and research. However, increasing access to data through ERP systems also brings new risks to the privacy and security of health records, as well as practical aspects that need to be catered for in order to reap the full benefits of such a system without any disadvantages.

The importance of being able to access EPRs becomes apparent when looking at the accident and emergency setting or for example the cancer unit of a specific hospital. It is here that access to a patient’s medical history can become a matter of life and death.

It is clear that nowadays IT sits at the heart of modern hospitals, so it is key to ensure IT systems are available to healthcare professionals 24 hours 7 days a week. This means that hospital management and their IT support needs to be sure that the technology they deploy can monitor the entire system around the clock. So, for the last few years, hospitals and healthcare providers have turned to the latest and greatest technologies to support their systems, minimising the risk of disruptions to operations and ensuring availability.

The right solution needs to be 100% effective, which is only possibly if it monitors and receives data continually 24 hours, 7 days a week, with absolutely no hiccups. If this is not the case all the time, there could be lives at stake. If any unexpected downtime occurs, the ability to access records, the continued running of life support monitors and MRI scanners is at risk. Clearly, hospitals and healthcare providers need to ensure that their systems are adequately protected against any unexpected IT failures.

While undoubtedly many hospitals and healthcare providers are using various different systems, they should not forget that these systems need to be protected. If the servers behind the systems experience downtime, it could cause havoc with patient-facing devices and the EPR system. IT system availability is no longer an ideal – it is a necessity. That is why hospitals and healthcare providers need to be sure that when adopting the newest, ‘safest’ technologies, they also ensure that they come with rock solid availability. Continuous uptime for the healthcare industry is absolutely essential to ensure the success of the business as well as the safety of patients.
 

J. Knipper and Company, Inc. , a leader in the healthcare marketing industry recently implmented Marathon's everRun automated availability software for the continued successful management of two specific high-level downtime risks:

• the protection of building systems that regulate their refrigerated pharmaceutical samples. FDA regulations require stringent control of these systems.
• the protection of their MyPharmaSuite™ Software as a Service (SaaS) web applications. Downtime here could result in customer service headaches and frustration.

Founded in 1986, J. Knipper provides healthcare marketing solutions in direct marketing, sampling, compliance, information technology, and sales force productivity. Going beyond its roots in direct marketing and sample distribution, Knipper continues to offer innovative solutions to sales force challenges, including MyPharmaRep.com (online solution for vacant-territory coverage) and MySampleCloset.com (online sample ordering).

The company has invested considerably in its physical and data infrastructure over the years: the company currently has 270,000 square feet of space, with 12,000 of that for refrigerated and 7,500 for controlled substances, along with an advanced Data Center, fully protected for the secure and safe handling of database management and sample supplies. Knipper is one of a handful of companies approved as an AMA DBL (database licensee). With its new infrastructure and SaaS product suite, Knipper needed to find a high availability solution that would deliver the 24x7 reliability required for the safe handling of application hosting, database management, and enterprise services.

“We have several client-facing web applications designed to enable physicians to order products and to provide sales representatives with a means to order samples and access product literature. It’s extremely important that these web applications are available 24x7. Many of the reps and physicians that our products serve are ordering in the middle of the night, early in the morning, at all times of the day,” said Knipper’s web systems engineer Marc Gerardi.

Knipper was using automatic system health checks with third party tools and file sync technology to control these downtime risks. “It was a time consuming manual process of systems recovery requiring dedicated monitoring personnel and rapid group response to mitigate issues when they occurred,” said Tony Quintenz, Knipper’s Director of Network Services. “The overhead associated with mitigating downtime, including the administrative and operating costs, as well as the learning curve and time required to train employees in the process was a significant burden on the entire IT team,” added Mr. Quintenz.

Knipper is now using Marathon’s everRun software, running on standard Dell servers, to guarantee that its critical applications, including the warehouse management system and web applications, would be available and operational at all times with a lower overhead and higher ROI. everRun is used to protect many of Knipper’s enterprise production environments from downtime, including several Dell PowerEdge R900 servers with Microsoft SQL Server. Knipper purchased, installed and configured the everRun software quickly and easily.

“We chose Marathon because they offered the best package overall. everRun offered real-time synchronization which is key for our 24x7 operations, it’s cost-effective and required minimal training for our employees. Another winning factor was the simple implementation; we were set up within a matter of hours, not days,” said Mr. Quintenz.

Since Knipper finished the everRun implementation, its enterprise environments, including its warehouse management system and client facing web applications have maintained the highest level of availability in spite of planned and unplanned events. “It’s a great product, we are now able to maintain our high level of redundancy, reliability and flexibility for our web-based products and enterprise services in the most cost effective and efficient manner,” added Gerardi.

After realizing the disaster recovery and data protection benefits of supporting its critical applications with everRun, Knipper plans to expand its use for additional web applications and other solutions. “As we expand more of our services on the web and offer additional options for customers, we will look to everRun for the continued protection we need.”

For healthcare organizations and their IT departments, almost everything is mission critical, from patient information to registration systems and records management. Information needs to be readily available and data has to protected at all times to avoid compliance risk or calamitous consequences.

From what we’ve seen, the interest in virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery is driven by two key factors: cost savings and greater demand for 24x7 availability of health records. Like so many organizations in this tough economy, health care providers are under tremendous pressure to deliver the same quality services at lower cost. Using server virtualization for server consolidation can help. And the VMotion and XenMotion capability in VMware and XenServer respectively can provide these organizations with DR that is significantly easier to deploy and execute. On top of XenServer they can add everRun VM for fault tolerant, high availability protection that is much more affordable and practical than what they have had in the past.

Testament of the increased interest in virtualization from healthcare organizations comes from our own experiences here at Marathon. We’ve seen a positive uptake in healthcare customers who are deploying everRun VM to protect their virtual environments. Currently, about 30% of new customers that are in Marathon’s pipeline for sales are in the healthcare related space. We can only assume that the number of healthcare customers we service will continue to grow as we venture into 2009.

The changes these organizations are making are allowing them to stay ahead of the competition as they increase efficiency, ensure the availability of patient records and most importantly set the standard for inpatient and outpatient care.

Are you part of a healthcare organization that is starting to deploy server virtualization? Is more effective HA and DR a key goal?

One of our customers is The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the organization responsible for the sequencing of one-third of the human genome. Wellcome Trust made international headlines in June with the announcement of the discovery of specific genes for seven common ailments.

Here is an excerpt from a detailed article in the UK’s Telegraph:

“The largest ever study of its kind has found 10 new genes linked to seven of the most common ailments: heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, bipolar disorder and Crohn’s disease.

Some 200 British scientists from 50 research groups collaborated to discover the genes after screening DNA from 17,000 people.

'By identifying the genes underlying these conditions, our study should enable scientists to understand better how disease occurs, which people are most at risk and, in time, to produce more effective, more personalised treatments.’said Professor Peter Donnelly from Oxford University, chairman of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium."

Our small part in all this is that Wellcome Trust uses both everRun HA and everRun FT to keep researchers continuously connected to their Exchange servers and certain reporting systems. They will also be using everRun to ensure their new ERP system is always available. You can read more about how Wellcome Trust uses everRun here.

Today, Shahid Shah, author of The Healthcare IT Guy blog, posted an article written by our own Joost Verhofstad, Director of Healthcare Solutions. To give you a quick overview, the article discusses the growing need and demand for safeguarding critical patient information to ensure that unplanned system downtime never comes between patients and their healthcare needs. Here is an excerpt:

“What is the single most reason given by Healthcare IT Administrators for improving IT infrastructure? Without question, Patient Care tops every list, followed closely by federal regulations and costs. With the rise in government mandated regulations such as HIPAA, identifying ways to encourage widespread use of electronic data interchange has resulted in a surge of activity within healthcare organizations from hospitals to pharmaceutical organizations looking for ways to streamline processes that improve patient care and reduce risk. In today’s world, it is imperative that no patient ever has to wait to receive care; especially not as a result of paperwork or technology issues.”

Take a look at the post and leave any feedback you might have, or if you are interested in case studies from some of our clients in the Healthcare industry, please let us know and we would be happy to share them with you.

One of our beliefs is that virtualization will find its way into the broader markets by the year 2010. Like all new technology that enters, there is a life-cycle for adoption that products go through before crossing the chasm into the mainstream markets. Virtualization is currently in the Innovator stage, where vendors are competing with one another to capture the attention of the early adopter market. See this post illustrating the ongoing battle between leading virtualization vendors VMWare and XenSource.

Cutting through the vendor hype are two industries that we believe will help push virtualization beyond the early adopters, healthcare and financial services. Just this week IBM announced the consolidation of the data center at St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis using their virtualization technology. This is a giant leap for the healthcare industry because not only does it eliminate administrative and IT costs, but patient records, tests and results are now being archived which will enhance overall patient care. As other industries recognize how organizations like St. Anthony’s can move critical applications and information to virtual environments, they will be more likely to introduce virtual environments into their own organizations. Of course, these organizations will only do this once they are convinced in the reliability of those virtual applications.