When Jesse Fasolo joined St. Joseph’s Health as director of technology infrastructure and cybersecurity, the existing technology infrastructure needs to be addressed.
PROBLEM
The primary concern is that the overall system is not future-proof and is not appreciated for sustainability or scalability. Even something as simple as a mass email with a PDF attachment will dramatically affect performance, leaving patients waiting to be admitted to the hospital or doctors waiting for test results.
“These day-to-day performance issues lead to slowdowns, and as we started to collect more advanced data and use technologies like AI and analytics, we knew the way to go,” explains Fasolo. This approach is not sustainable. “Using data to make business decisions is critical, especially now, and we need an environment capable of providing the performance needed for advanced digital processing. than.
He added: “Another big concern – not just for St. Joseph that across the industry – is the continued threat of ransomware attacks that plague the entire healthcare system.
According to research from Sophos, in the last year alone, ransomware attacks targeting the industry have increased by 94%. With the old storage system of St. Joseph’s had when Fasolo first joined the organization, recovering from ransomware attacks took an average of 247 days.
“This will disrupt clinicians’ workflow, cause huge headaches for IT, and prevent us from delivering the best patient care possible,” he noted. “The COVID-19 pandemic has further fueled the need for disaster recovery planning, so we’ve committed to upgrading our systems.”
SUGGESTIONS
Vendor Pure Storage’s FlashArray // C with Veeam is proposed as the technology that powers St. Joseph’s backup and restore. In the event of a ransomware attack, the software has the ability to help with immediate recovery using snapshots – taken every 15 minutes – from Pure SafeMode.
“It also provides non-disruptive upgrades and consistent, millisecond latency for our demanding healthcare environment, so we never have clinicians or staff another deal with wasted downtime,” Fasolo said.
“Another big change we’ve seen is that despite growing demand for data and support, we’ve reduced overall data center footprint as well as power and cooling consumption, from the four rotating disc racks down to a small portion of the rack.”
Jesse Fasolo, St. Joseph’s Health
“Also, our big priority is having the ability to start migrating workloads to the cloud so that we can store the data that needs saving but without constant access,” he continued. “Pure’s partnership with Amazon Web Services was another deciding factor when investing in this technology, as it allows us to use the AWS cloud for backup and disaster recovery, application migration, and data as well as development testing.”
CHALLENGE MIX ONLY
Pure Storage’s implementation of technology has allowed St. Joseph’s becomes a more data-driven organization and optimizes processes to streamline patient care and daily work.
“It has delivered immediate improvements in the performance and reliability of clinical applications, email, analytics, Citrix VDI, etc,” explains Fasolo. “Now email backups take two hours instead of four days, and if something goes wrong in one data center, systems will continue to run seamlessly.
“The infrastructure also allows us to improve and enhance care with more advanced data mining, as well as capabilities like AI in some of our clinical applications,” he continued. customary. “For example, our radiology department uses AI to read images and make recommendations to the professionals they work with, and with Pure we can easily store, access and use AI-driven insights.”
St. Joseph’s can also use the live data it currently has access to, to track everything from revenue trends to hospital utilization rates and patient health, meaning the technology is widely used. spread across all groups and provide both clinically and operationally important insights, he noted.
RESULT
In addition to the aforementioned metrics, the supplier who helped St. Joseph’s cuts email backup time by 98% and reduces IT maintenance time to one hour per month. This helps the IT team focus on other urgent tasks based on need, further optimizing system performance.
“In terms of the impact on our healthcare workers and others in the operations space, one of the key metrics we observed was the increase in user login time from minutes to minutes. seconds left,” Fasolo reported. “This helps our team members focus on the work that matters more than waiting to access the apps they need, while also preventing additional lag time when it comes to timely tasks. time as document.
“Another big change we’ve seen is that despite growing demand for data and support, we’ve reduced overall data center footprint as well as power and cooling consumption, from four rotating disc racks down to a small portion of the rack,” he added.
Hospitals and health systems have the potential to make a significant and immediate impact in reducing the carbon footprint of the global data center – supplier technology has facilitated St. Joseph’s ability to do so, Fasolo said.
TIPS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
“All healthcare delivery organizations need to prioritize data storage and access to data,” advises Fasolo. “Increasingly, the field is driven and enhanced by the insights we gather, and it’s imperative that data is available and protected from risk as much as possible. for the success of the healthcare industry.
“We can now track critical patient information and we don’t have to constantly think and worry about whether our IT infrastructure is failing,” he continued. .
Everyone in the healthcare industry has a lot going for it, and having a storage technology that isn’t a source of ongoing concern is incredibly reassuring and a relief, he added.
“We have been able to minimize disruption to hospital operations and patient care, drive continuous healthcare innovations with AI and analytics, and enable clinicians,” he said. Access medical data in seconds.
He concluded: “This helps St. Joseph’s moves at the speed we need to serve our communities, and the longevity of the solution means we’ll be able to continue to do so for many years to come.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
