Setting the pace for the future

The Evangelical Hospital (EVK) Mettmann offers a wide range of medical treatment with eleven specialist disciplines, institutes and interdisciplinary centers. Thanks to the interdisciplinary cooperation between the doctors in the hospital and numerous collaborations with other hospitals in the Bergisch and Rhineland regions, EVK Mettmann, which has been fully digitalized since 2016, is one of the top addresses for excellent medicine and care beyond the city limits. The hospital has 245 beds. A team of 60 doctors and several hundred nursing staff care for around 11,000 inpatients every year. In addition, there are almost 15,000 outpatient treatments each year. The storage of
patient data and the complete documentation of treatment is stored using the electronic patient file, or ePa for short. www.evk-mettmann.de

Added value for the customer

Management Summary

Hardly any other industry produces as much data as the healthcare sector: Patient files, laboratory findings, CT scans, personnel data, health insurance statements - in particular due to new, increasingly high-resolution digital imaging procedures, the amount of data in hospitals is multiplying at ever shorter intervals. This requires constant upgrading of data storage capacities in hospitals, which are often faced with a limited IT budget. This is where a system house partner such as IT-HAUS GmbH can help to increase the efficiency of IT, simplify its management with end-to-end solutions and thus reduce costs.

Starting position

The Evangelisches Krankenhaus Mettmann has already been recognized for its quality in many areas and has been certified according to ISO 9001:2015 since the beginning of 2017. From admission to discharge, all work steps were examined to ensure optimal patient care, while at the same time risk management was reviewed to ensure the best possible patient safety. In order to keep up with the times in terms of IT, the company has been relying on its system house partner, IT-HAUS GmbH , in the client area for years. In mid-2018, those responsible once again turned to IT-HAUS, this time in light of a planned data center restructuring. The company's network was already operating at the limits of its capacity, resulting in performance problems with important business applications and the threat of data loss and wear and tear - an untenable situation for a hospital.

Requirements

One of the biggest challenges for EvK Mettmann's IT is coping with its exponential data growth while at the same time facing high cost pressure. For example, the customer had a significantly lower budget available for the redesign of the solution implemented in 2013, in which heterogeneous server, network and storage components were integrated into a highly complex shared IT infrastructure, than five years previously. In addition, its administration was so demanding and time-consuming that the in-house IT team had to rely on the support of an external service provider for configurations and adjustments.

Goals

- Ensure future capacity and performance needs are met
- Simplify the environment
- Consolidate to a single vendor
- IT-HAUS as the single point of contact for maintenance and support

Solution

After a detailed assessment of the customer's current situation, IT-HAUS turned to Dell EMC, the manufacturer with the industry's most comprehensive - and IT-HAUS well-known - infrastructure portfolio for clients, data centers and the cloud. Based on its demonstrably high level of technical know-how and many years of expertise, IT-HAUS GmbH was awarded the highest national Dell EMC partner status in 2018, making it one of an exclusive circle of around 15 "Titanium" partners in Germany. By optimizing existing and evolved IT systems, IT-HAUS is able to help its customers achieve a significantly more efficient cost-benefit ratio. They also benefit from significantly better purchasing conditions, preferential delivery and high-level manufacturer support thanks to cross-border volume bundling. To explore the possibilities for a cost-efficient expansion of the existing data center, IT-HAUS used Live Optics, a cloud-based software that the manufacturer offers for free download. The hardware- and platform-independent analysis service collects key performance indicators such as hard disk I/O, data throughput, free and used capacity and memory utilization. Live Optics then creates a detailed analysis of server computing loads and capacity requirements, which IT-HAUS uses to design a configuration that is tailored to the customer's needs. When sizing the hardware, IT-HAUS was guided by a life cycle of five years and the data growth forecast for this period based on empirical values from the healthcare sector. For example, the need for storage capacity in hospitals has increased significantly since the introduction of electronic patient records - experts assume an annual increase in data of up to 20 percent. With a consistent and particularly easy-to-administer solution from a single manufacturer (Dell EMC), IT-HAUS was ultimately able to convince those responsible and prevail over another applicant. The high-availability solution was installed in close cooperation with the customer. This consists of two storage arrays with synchronous replication across two fire compartments, i.e. two storage nodes between which the entire database is permanently mirrored in real time. Fully preconfigured at Föhren , the system was delivered to the customer ready for operation, where IT-HAUS supported the setup and commissioning on site. The complete migration, on the other hand, was carried out by the customer himself. The fact that EvK's data center is already 100% virtualized proved to be an advantage here. Thanks to vMotion, virtual machines can be moved between physical hosts in VMware environments without downtime, i.e. without causing interruptions for users during ongoing hospital operations. The latest technologies and efficiency-optimized storage functions such as auto tiering, compression, data deduplication and SSD caching round off the solution, which can be fully administered via a graphical user interface.

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