Many midmarket organizations face challenges in equipping their IT infrastructure to support privacy and regulatory protocols and ensure consistent uptime, but those in the health care field have a unique challenge. For a healthcare professional, the reliability needed in their IT environment can literally be the difference between life and death. Finding an IT solution that supports compliance and ensures utmost performance is essential.

Pivotal Turning Points

Laurens County Health Care System, a 90 bed health care organization in Clinton, South Carolina was looking to deploy the Meditech clinical information system to improve patient information and care, as well as enable computerized physician order entry (CPOE). With 30 physical servers in their data center, an offline server could cause multiple facets of their infrastructure to go down. Additionally they found their staff of 11 IT workers often fighting fires instead of proactively addressing business needs. Hospital employees were using so many different laptops and desktops that just maintaining current versions of basic software was difficult. Downtime was up to 40% in the physical data center.

Running Meditech in the current environment was not feasible. Laurens County Health Care System needed to deploy a cost-efficient plan and looked to VMware for a solution.

The Solutions Journey

By deploying VMware vSphere ^®, the IT staff virtualized their domain controllers, then implemented Exchange Server internally and moved it to a virtualized infrastructure. By adding vSphere vMotion, they enabled high availability for their virtualized file and print servers, as well as various applications.

“It’s a nightmare maintaining 50 physical PCs on nursing carts. Today, I can roll out 30 virtual desktops in 15 minutes and manage them all from a central location,” said Joe Lovell, IT Infrastructure Manager at Laurens County Health Care System. “Obviously, there are other vendors out there, but given the technical strengths, ease of implementation, and the centralized management capabilities, VMware was the obvious choice.”

VMware View enabled the organization to employ a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for physicians, while also solving compliance and security concerns and ensuring the mobility necessary for excellent patient care.

“Physicians are very excited that they can use their own devices from anywhere to access Meditech and review EMRs [electronic medical records] and patient data without physically having to come into the hospital,” says Gina Driggers, IT Director at Laurens County Health Care System.   “With View, no matter what device they’re using, all the computing happens here in the data center, which is a huge security and compliance safety net.”

Immediate Business Benefits and Looking Forward

Using VMware vSphere, Laurens County Health Care System successfully deployed Meditech in a virtualized environment and is on target to Stage 1 of Meaningful Use.

In addition, the virtualized data center servers now see uptime in the 99.999% range. On top of that, by switching from PCs to thin clients, the organization was able to decrease hardware costs by 65%.

Next up, Laurens County Health Care System is looking to tackle disaster recovery with vCenter Site Recovery Manager. “ And VMware is not just for large hospitals,” says Lovell. “It is definitely something that can help smaller hospitals that don’t have the financial resources and the IT resources of a larger organization.”

Read the full success story about Laurens County Health Care System here.

I look forward to continuing to share these stories and demonstrating how VMware can help you simplify your infrastructure and deliver real world results for your business.

Have you faced similar IT or compliance challenges in your organization? How have you solved them?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Until next time,

Brandon

Follow VMware SMB on Facebook, Twitter, Spiceworks and Google+ for more blog posts, conversation with your peers, and additional insights on IT issues facing small to midmarket businesses.