COMPANY
Asian Hospital and Medical Center is a tertiary care hospital located in Muntinlupa, the Southern gateway city into Metro Manila. With over 1,000 medical staff, the hospital has been providing high quality care since 2002.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
BUSINESS NEED
Needed new IT infrastructure overhaul to accommodate expansion
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
– Acropolis, including AHV virtualization
– Prism management
BENEFITS
Increased operational efficiencies by over 30%Reduced time required for managing and monitoring systems by 70%Achieved 50% savings in power consumption/utilities billImproved staff morale and retention
CHALLENGE
Strategically located at the crossroads between the Philippines’ Central Business District of Makati City, the International and Domestic Airports, and the South Luzon Expressway (SLEX), Asian Hospital & Medical Center has been growing rapidly, with an approximate 10% increase in patient numbers year-on-year since 2012.
However, the hospital’s consistent growth had resulted in capacity constraints and inefficiencies, with increasingly more IT manpower required to manage and maintain the outdated legacy systems. Since the hospital’s incumbent technology left few options to scale and IT talent was difficult to attract, Asian Hospital embarked on a software and hardware overhaul.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What would Google do to manage all of this data?’” said Dr. Juan Antonio Javellana, Director of Medical Informatics at Asian Hospital. “It became clear that we needed the flexibility of the cloud to support our expansion. But as a healthcare provider, it’s imperative that all patient information remains confidential and secure. However, questions remain around the cost and reliability of the public cloud in the Philippines, as well as how the regulatory landscape might evolve in the coming years, so we wanted a solution that would allow us to keep our data onsite, while offering the same benefits of the cloud.”
Dr. Javellana continued, “We were introduced to hyperconverged solutions by another vendor, but we ultimately went with Nutanix. The other vendors offered complicated and cryptic descriptions of their solutions, but Nutanix made it easy to understand exactly what their technology could offer and how easy it was to implement. Even a non-technical person like myself could fully grasp its capabilities.”
SOLUTION
Asian Hospital turned to Nutanix for two main features – its management software and its cloud capabilities – to lead the hospital into a new digital era. With Nutanix, Asian Hospital was able to deploy enterprise applications, including their core SQL-based Orion Hospital Information System (HIS) and integrated Enterprise Resourcing Planning system, in a private cloud, along with MS Exchange and a domain controller. Ten hosts were virtualized using Nutanix AHV, while Nutanix Prism supported powerful central management.
“Once our new HIS upgrade was ready, it was only a matter of hours before we could run the optimization script – something that would have taken days previously. We implemented a backup solution from HYCU for snapshot and granular file level recovery. The solution was designed for zero downtime from failures, resource congestion, or disruption to day-to-day operations,” shared Dr. Javellana.
“The HIS upgrade required a number of additional, last minute messaging and middle-tier servers. But with the Nutanix technology in place, we were able to create these in a matter of minutes. Previously, this could have taken several days, if not weeks,” added Dr. Javellana.
RESULTS
Since the deployment in January of 2018, Asian Hospital has reported an incredible 70% reduction in the time required for managing and monitoring systems, enabling the IT department to focus their efforts elsewhere. “Where once we struggled to recruit enough talent to man our IT, our existing team can now comfortably cover the hospital’s requirements. And, perhaps more importantly, they’re excited about the new technology; morale has definitely improved,” commented Dr. Javellana.
Meanwhile, AHMC noted a 30% improvement in operational efficiencies, as well as an approximate 50% reduction in utility bills — a direct result of the highly successful Nutanix conversion. “However, I think everyone’s favorite feature is the Nutanix capacity planning dashboard,” added Dr. Javellana. “In the past, we were restricted by whatever storage we had available. With the Prism dashboard, it allows us to plan our capacity years in advance, so we can strategically prepare for the hospital’s growth.”
NEXT STEPS
Now that Asian Hospital’s back-end systems are in order, over the coming months, the hospital plans to bring these efficiencies to the front of house and pass on the benefits to incoming patients – such as, by implementing Orion Health’s EMR module (Consult) and enhancing patient-facing portals.
In the meantime, the IT department is constantly testing and improving the HIS by leveraging virtualized environments – a feature that wasn’t supported by the previous infrastructure. “Today, we’re using Version 17.3 of our hospital information system, but we’re already looking as far ahead as Version 18.1,” commented Dr. Javellana. “We are confident that we made the right choice in our new IT infrastructure, and would like to consider ourselves a relatively early adopter of enterprise cloud computing in the Philippine market. Nutanix is the future of IT, and we are positive that others will follow suit in no time.”
We are confident that we made the right choice in our new IT infrastructure and would like to consider ourselves a relatively early adopter of enterprise cloud computing in the Philippine market. Nutanix is the future of IT, and we are positive that others will follow suit in no time.
Dr. Juan Antonio Javellana, Director of Medical Informatics, Asian Hospital & Medical Center