When Jesse Fasolo joined St. Joseph’s Health as Director of Technology Infrastructure and Cyber Security, existing technology infrastructure issues needed to be addressed.
Problem
The main problem is that the whole system is not future-proof and not designed for Be prepared for sustainability or scalability. Even something as simple as a mass email with PDF attachments can significantly impact performance, leaving patients waiting for admission or doctors waiting for lab results.
“These day-to-day performance issues lead to slowdowns, and as we begin to collect more advanced data and leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence and analytics, we know this approach is not sustainable,” Fasolo explained. “Using data to make business decisions is critical, especially now that we need an environment that can deliver the performance required for more advanced digital processing.
” Another major concern – not only for St. Joseph, and for the industry as a whole, the ongoing risk of ransomware attacks has plagued the entire healthcare system,” he added.
According to Sophos research, a 94% increase was only in A ransomware attack targeting the industry last year. When Fasolo first joined the group, it took an average of 247 days to recover from a ransomware attack using St. Joseph’s legacy storage system.
” This will disrupt clinician workflows, cause serious headaches for IT departments, and prevent us from providing the best possible patient care,” he noted, “The COVID-19 pandemic has further driven the need for disaster recovery plans. , so we committed to upgrading our systems. ”
Proposed
FlashArray//C and Veeam from vendor Pure Storage Proposed as a technology to assist St. Joseph’s in backup and recovery. In the case of a ransomware attack, the software is able to use snapshots from Pure SafeMode (taken every 15 minutes) to aid in immediate recovery.
“It also provides non-disruptive upgrades and consistency, providing a millisecond of latency for our demanding healthcare environment, so we never have clinicians or other staff members dealing with wasted downtime,” Fasolo said.
“Another major shift we’ve noticed is that despite growing demand for data and support, we’ve reduced our overall data center footprint and power and cooling consumption from four machines Rack spins disks to a small portion of the rack. “
Jesse Fasolo, St. Joseph’s Health
“Furthermore, our first priority is to be able to start migrating workloads to the cloud so we can archive data that we need to keep but don’t need to access frequently,” he said. continued. “Pure’s partnership with Amazon Web Services was another decisive factor in investing in the technology, as it allows us to use the AWS cloud for backup and disaster recovery, application and data migration, and development testing. ”
RACE THE CHALLENGE
Implementing Pure Storage technology made St. Joseph’s a A more data-driven organization with optimized processes to simplify patient care and daily workflow.
“It immediately improves performance and performance of clinical applications, email, analytics, Citrix VDI and more. Reliability,” Fasolo explained. “Email backups now take two hours instead of four days, and if one data center fails, the system continues to operate seamlessly.
“The infrastructure also enables us to improve and advance care by leveraging more advanced data as well as capabilities like AI in some of our clinical applications,” he continued. “For example, our Radiology uses AI to read images and make recommendations to the experts who work with them, and with Pure, we can easily store, access and leverage these AI-driven insights. ”
St. Joseph can also use the real-time data it now has access to to track everything from revenue trends to hospital utilization rates and patient status, meaning the technology works across all teams is widely used in and provides important clinical and operational insights, he noted.
RESULTS
In addition to the above metrics, this vendor has helped St. Joseph reduce email backup time by 98% or less and IT maintenance time is an hour per month. This allows the IT team to focus on other urgent tasks to further optimize system performance.
“In terms of the impact on our clinical staff and others in the operational space, one of the key metrics we observed was user logins Time has gone from minutes to seconds,” Fasolo reports. “This helps our team members focus on important work instead of waiting to access the applications they need, and it also prevents timely tasks like documents from being processed. Additional delay time occurs.
” Another major shift we’ve noticed is that despite growing demand for data and support, we’ve reduced our overall data center footprint and power and cooling consumption , reduced from four racks of spinning disks to a fraction of one rack,” he added.
Hospitals and health systems have the potential to have a significant and immediate impact on reducing carbon emissions from data centers around the world — and the vendor’s technology facilitates St. Joseph’s ability to do so, Fasolo said.
Advice to others
“All healthcare provider organizations are Data storage and access to data need to be prioritized,” Fasolo advises. “The insights we gather are increasingly driving and advancing the field, and ensuring that data is readily available and protected with as many risks as possible is essential to the success of the healthcare industry.
“We are now able to track critical information about our patients, and we don’t have to constantly think and worry about whether our IT infrastructure is going to fail,” he continued. He added that incredible peace of mind and relief .
“We have been able to minimize disruption to hospital operations and patient care, facilitate continuous healthcare innovation through artificial intelligence and analytics, and allow clinicians to access medical data in several seconds,” he said.
“This has allowed St. Joseph’s to move at the speed we need to serve our community, and the longevity of the solution means we will be able to continue for years to come. Do it,” he concluded.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the author: bsi[email protected] Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS media publication.
