Cloud Framework Enables Agile Patient Care

Sentara Healthcare, a not-for-profit healthcare organization serving Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, is always looking at how to improve the quality of its patient care. And with a recent partnership with Dell Technologies, the organization has streamlined its systems with a hybrid multi-cloud framework.

The healthcare organization is growing rapidly and has plans to expand to 18 hospitals – doubling its more than 30,000-person workforce of physicians, nurses, and other staff. To keep pace with increasing demands created by these expansion plans, Sentara Healthcare has completely modernized its IT infrastructure.

“The traditional data center in the hospital basement is a thing of the past,” said Matthew Douglas, chief enterprise architect for Sentara Healthcare, in a press release. “Dell Technologies has empowered us to leverage a hybrid, multi-cloud framework and agilely treat patients anywhere, even around the globe.”

The cloud-first approach, according to the company, also provides significant benefits for patients – especially by improving telehealth capabilities and better enabling the use of mobile devices to deliver patient care.

“We’re getting amazing results leveraging our large databases on PowerMax in our colocated data centers, as well as in the cloud,” said Douglas. “We’re migrating the data from our old platform to Red Hat on the new platform, and then we’re replicating it using Equinix. Ultimately, some of the data is pushed out to the cloud. We need mission-critical, cloud-enabled storage — and we have that with PowerMax.”

Sentara Healthcare workers are counting on the high performance of its electronic medical record (EMR) system. With support from Dell Technologies, Sentara Healthcare has been able to provide its healthcare workers with the information they need to improve the quality of care for patients. PowerMax has ensured that doctors and nurses can access essential data much more quickly and efficiently.

The healthcare organization’s IT systems also now have 10 times faster data access due to lower latency; and eight times higher input/output operations per second, which provides the capabilities the company needs as it continues to expand.

“[Dell’s] PowerMax has been a game changer,” said Robert Jaecques, operations IT manager for Sentara Healthcare. “As we acquire new hospitals, we know that we’ll be able to scale our infrastructure to support increased usage without running out of back-end horsepower.”

In addition, utilizing these solutions has also reduced the cost of IT modernization by several million for the company, according to Douglas. While “spending less money [Senatara] is getting better performance,” he said.