Morris Hospital Thinks, Looks, Plans, and Moves Ahead with a Road Map to Its Future
Data storage and recovery is important for any business, but in health care it truly is a matter of life and death. Gone are the days when patient charts were held in clipboards and medication information obtained from the pages of the Physician’s Desk Reference. Now all critical patient care information is stored electronically. But what if there’s a flood? Or a core switch failure? Or an unplanned system outage? What happens then?
Morris Hospital & Healthcare Centers, a community hospital west of Chicago, experienced each of those events within a two-year period. While there were no lasting repercussions, the hospital knew the potential impact of outages—delayed patient registration, diminished quality of patient care due to unavailable medical records, increased risk of malpractice, and compromised regulatory compliance. These risks were unacceptable—both to the hospital and the regulatory agencies governing it.
Rapidly growing information increased the need
for an expanded backup and recovery solution
In addition to all its existing data, Morris Hospital was implementing PACS (picture archiving communication systems) for digital images, which was going to explode their information storage requirements. This made a scalable storage solution absolutely necessary right then and the demand was only going to grow.
Part of Morris Hospital’s storage challenge was a deep concern for the reliability of its backups. Direct patient care was increasingly dependent on applications and information housed on the servers and storage. The hospital needed to know its system was fault-tolerant and redundant and, should that fail, it could recover all the data in acceptable time frames. Entirely reliant on tape, the primary provider said it could take up to four weeks to recover a single application if everything worked.
Compounding the problem was a data center with very limited real estate. The organization thought virtualization would ease the situation, but wanted assistance in developing a strategy—short-term and long-term.
Morris Hospital found itself in a sea of products and solutions, with more questions than answers, struggling to determine which way to go.
“What we needed was confidence—in the reliability of our storage, in the recoverability of our data in the event of a disaster, and particularly in our decisions,” said Ryan Shullaw, Morris Hospital’s IT director. “As a small IT department in a relatively small community hospital, we wanted someone knowledgeable to help determine the right decisions.”
A customized road map proved to be the answer, with short-term
resolution of storage issues and long-term strategy for virtualization
Morris Hospital turned to Ahead. Through a comprehensive understanding of Morris Hospital’s current state and its problems, combined with determining where the institution wanted to go in the future, Ahead was able to provide the support the hospital sought.
Ahead developed a multi-year plan to redesign and streamline Morris Hospital’s data center infrastructure. The final piece, a disaster recovery plan, created an infrastructure that would support the hospital’s mission and goals while consolidating the space requirements and reducing vendors. This also mitigated the risk to patient safety and the threat of business interruptions from lost information and offline systems.
Ahead helped IT make a compelling case that established the need for the solution and the return on investment. While this can often be a hurdle in an industry not accustomed to being dependent on information technology for its core business, Morris Hospital understood the business benefits of the disaster recovery system Ahead proposed.
One of these benefits was that the system would make Morris Hospital eligible for several multi-year grants. Still, in a difficult economic environment, the $1.2 million cost presented seemingly insurmountable budget problems. Ahead stepped in with a creative financing program including extended payment terms, enabling the organization to proceed with the disaster recovery project, which was completed on-time and on-budget.
Using technologies from market leaders VMware, Cisco, and EMC, Ahead helped Morris Hospital redesign the information technology infrastructure and data center. The new IT infrastructure brought all the equipment in-house, eliminating the requirement for outside vendors and leased space. An added bonus was that by replicating tier 1 applications with EMC RecoverPoint and tier 2 applications with Data Domain, Morris Hospital became 100% tapeless, eliminating the cost, risk, and maintenance associated with shipping tape off site.
After a multi-year, comprehensive transformation, the IT infrastructure is 90% virtualized. The phased rearchitecting of the infrastructure created the foundation necessary for a disaster recovery system that will:
- replicate information electronically to an alternate location
- create a daily backup to a deduplicated disk-based media for reduced costs
- automate the process for easy and rapid restore with minimal staff involvement
The new enterprise-class infrastructure reduces risk, makes
information more accessible, and supports improved patient care quality
Ahead was instrumental in helping Morris Hospital create an enterprise-class consolidated infrastructure that provides off-site replication of its critical data within minutes. This increased level of business continuity and reduction in risk is an important part of how Morris Hospital differentiates itself.
With the disaster recovery system in place, Morris Hospital has been able to start leveraging multi-year state and federal grants to help recoup its costs. Ahead continues to work with the organization by providing supporting documentation as needed to complete grant applications.
“Working with Ahead to come up with a comprehensive and intelligent strategy for the implementation of the solutions saved us time and money. Now we are making decisions on products and applications that we can build on,” observed Shullaw.
“Ahead understands the technology and made an investment in Morris Hospital. Ahead has filled the gap, turning the technology into solutions that add value to my organization.”
“When we set out, we weren’t thinking about the private cloud,” Shullaw concluded, “but along the way we came to see that a truly functional healthcare private cloud is our goal: to be able to make information available in the most effective manner possible, at any time, from anywhere, to all our users wherever they may be.”
In a competitive healthcare market Morris Hospital & Healthcare Centers is now strongly positioned to achieve its mission to improve the health of area residents and to be a model for community hospitals nationwide.
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Morris, IL
Business Profile: the largest employer in Grundy County, with more than 900 employees and 180 physicians
Mission: To improve the health of area residents
Vision: To set a new standard for the provision of exemplary healthcare
Environment: Key components of the new state-of-the-art local data center:
- Cisco UCS
- CX4-240 storage array
- EMC Networker Software with DataDomain Deduplication appliances for operational recovery
- EMC Centera for long-term archive
- EMC RecoverPoint integrated with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager for Automated Replication and Recovery
Key Applications: MEDITECH, Agfa PACS (radiology), Heartlab PACS (cardiology), MS Exchange, and common services
Needs
- Scalable Storage Solution
- Relieve Data Center Congestion
Services
- Plan for scalable storage
- Short-term/long-term strategy for virtualization
- Data center migration assistance
- Backup and recovery strategy
Benefits
- Confidence—in the security of the data and the correctness of the decisions
- Leveraged compliance
- Cost savings
www.MorrisHospital.org