Healthcare Network Selects Advizex to Deploy HPE GreenLake

This Advizex customer has been serving New York state residents with healthcare excellence for more than a century.

Over that more than 100 years, it has become leader in rural care, including several hospitals as well as a satellite emergency department. Today, it employs hundreds of doctors and advanced practice clinicians, and staffs dozens of community-based primary care centers. It is committed to innovative and comprehensive care and services to people living throughout its region of New York. All together, it provides outpatient care to nearly 1 million patients , and emergency room treatment to tens of thousands.

That commitment to innovation means ensuring its main campus and connected hospitals have the modern healthcare technology needed, such as the latest in diagnostic equipment and electronic medical records (EMR), but also the IT infrastructure required to support them.

Of course, with hospitals in the State of New York mandated to operate as not-for-profits, this innovation must come with sights on budget efficiency while maintaining uncompromising safety and quality of healthcare service.

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A long partnership with Advizex

The healthcare network started working with Advizex in 2008 to aid with online security with spam and web filters. But the relationship grew organically, with Advizex taking on a greater position as a trusted adviser.

It was because of that trusted partnership that, more than a decade ago, when the hospital decided it would move from its existing electronic medical records system to Epic EMR that it welcomed Advizex to bid on the contract. After winning that contract and putting in the technology to support the new records system, Advizex was once again tapped to aid with a required refresh in 2015.

The network had incorporated several more smaller community hospitals. And, around the same time, with concerns about the age of its original campus and any potential risks to its data center, the hospital network built a fault-tolerant (Tier 3), redundant facility in another city.

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An EMR upgrade creates new IT requirements

Working with Advizex, the hospital network developed a five-year refresh cycle for its IT infrastructure, with a forecast to accommodate its growth.

With a major Epic upgrade on the horizon, by 2020, the original converged infrastructure systems in place for their compute storage resources were in need of an upgrade.
“[They have] very specific configuration requirements, and the hospital network knew there was going to be a massive expansion that would double the size of their IT environment,” says Michael Goodman, account executive at Advizex.

The hospital chose to move to a consumption-based IT model with HPE GreenLake to reduce capital outlay while also cutting a number of operational costs around things like software and firmware updates, which are handled by HPE. It also provided the hospital with valuable budget predictability during the refresh (as well as future ones), and the elasticity to expand and reduce its IT resources as required through the spare capacity installed.

“We spent about a year and a half with them, going over all the possible iterations and configurations possible, and then Covid hit.” With the pandemic, the need for hospital services grew, but so too did the supply chain constraints it faced.

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Advizex and HPE: A trusted team

The strong partnership between Advizex and HPE, as well as the work both had previously conducted for the healthcare network proved an asset during these challenges.
“We have a unique relationship. The same account teams have been working together on healthcare in New York state for nearly 15 years,” Goodman says. “It gives us vertical expertise, but for the hospitals we serve, the longevity of that partnership provides stability and a deeper understanding of their business.”

HPE and Advizex prioritized the hospital, making sure the three key components of its new IT infrastructure were deployed quickly. “We had equipment shipping in four weeks, which is almost unheard of. They themselves were counting on 80 days.”

The GreenLake implementation consisted of new servers and two-tiered storage to handle data migration. The primary tier of storage consists of HPE Primera, while the secondary tier replaced the hospitals existing NetApp storage solution with HPE Apollo with the Qumulo distributed file system for network attached storage (NAS) functionality.

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Better care through cost efficiency

In addition to the expected benefits, the savings that the healthcare network achieves through moving to a consumption-based model is helping insulate it against market volatility, Goodman suggests.
Ultimately that helps the Advizex healthcare customer achieve its primary goal.

“Every penny they save goes back into care,” Goodman says. “It goes back to things like paying for locum (temporary) nurses since, like many in the industry, the network has lost so many nurses in recent years. Staffing expenses have tripled.”

He says that the hospital network continues to investigate the decommissioning of older equipment and the possible migration of its data center for disaster recovery purposes. The Advizex account team is already helping them plan for ongoing changes and future infrastructure refreshes. But thanks to HPE GreenLake, those refreshes are ultimately more affordable.

“By adopting GreenLake they’ve been able to save money on upgrades rather than if they were going out to the market each time. And that’s money spent on patient care rather than IT maintenance.”

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