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Ensuring the Health of Healthcare at Fallon Clinic
Founded in 1929, Fallon Clinic is one of the largest private multi-specialty medical groups in Massachusetts with more than 240 physicians practicing in over 20 locations. One of the most dynamic and progressive healthcare organizations in the nation today, Fallon Clinic has nearly 2,000 internal users and handles more than 1 million patient visits per year.
Continually investing in new technologies to enhance patient care, Fallon Clinic time and again achieves some of the highest quality of care ratings in the country. Their IT organization works hard to make it possible for patients to conveniently receive optimal care, schedule appointments, and obtain test results via numerous self-service applications.
Monitoring Systems, Monitoring Care
In healthcare, quality is measured by "outcomes." An outcome, simply put, is the final result of any medical treatment. At Fallon Clinic, outcomes are routinely measured and monitored internally through Fallon Clinic's extensive electronic information systems.
At the heart of Fallon Clinic's operation is a vast network of IT systems and applications that handle the processing of almost all business activities. The quality of service Fallon Clinic provides its customers is closely tied to the health of its information technology systems and applications. A network failure, poor performing application, taxed server, malfunctioning voice mail system, or other internal infrastructure glitch can potentially cause a degradation in customer service and care.
In 2005, Fallon Clinic embarked upon a $24 million technology initiative that would lay the foundation for its electronic medical record system, as well as provide enhancements to the organization's existing electronic scheduling and billing systems. Wanting to become a near paperless entity offering more and more self-service electronic options to patients, Fallon Clinic realized that high system and application uptime was going to become even more essential.
Susan Paul, the IT Infrastructure Director, who was responsible for developing the company's extensive network, system and application performance monitoring strategy to support the initiative, set out to examine the landscape to identify the best tools available to for managing the company's current and future IT performance monitoring needs.
"With the new initiative ahead of us - and the new performance requirements it would impose - we needed to assess our monitoring needs and wanted to fully evaluate the performance monitoring product landscape," said Paul. "It was imperative for us to find, and utilize, products that would best meet our stringent system and application up-time requirements of 99.9999 percent."
As a result, Fallon Clinic issued an extensive performance monitoring RFP. Leading vendors including BMC, Concord System, Heroix and NetIQ responded. After conducting a thorough evaluation of the products proposed, Fallon Clinic chose Heroix EQ, an agent-based monitoring product, and Heroix Longitude, an agentless monitoring product. "We felt that the two products would complement each other nicely and provide a complete monitoring solution for the diverse systems that we needed to provide 4-9's reliability for," said Paul.
Longitude's agentless architecture made it easy to deploy and manage, and provided Fallon Clinic with self-maintaining, self-updating benefits. Using Longitude's agentless monitoring capabilities in conjunction with Heroix eQ, Fallon Clinic was confident it could effectively manage critical IT initiatives more effectively with minimal effort and costs.
Treating Causes Not Symptoms
Like most companies, Fallon Clinic's IT environment consists of a plethora of applications, switches, LANs, WANs, firewalls, servers (print, voice, file), routers and databases. Prior to deploying their new electronic medical record application, Fallon Clinic performed extensive load testing. In the past, the Clinic's IT staff often spent hours trying to pinpoint performance problems during load testing. "There are so many different layers and components involved in delivering optimal end-user IT service," said Paul. "Often the amount of data produced is overwhelming. With Longitude we are presented with concise and relevant information."
Using Heroix, Fallon Clinic was able to feel confident that the systems that offered out the new electronic medical record would be able to fully support the transaction load requirements.
Load testing is not the only problem Heroix products address. Longitude is used to monitor the performance of Fallon Clinic's Citrix servers, UNIX application servers and enterprise databases. Weekly performance reports are produced to assist the Clinic in understanding performance capacity. Trending reports capturing the historical performance of the Citrix and UNIX servers arm Fallon Clinic with key data. Real time alerting allows the Clinic's IT management to be confident that they will find performance problems before their users do.
Using Heroix's comprehensive SLA capabilities allows Fallon Clinic to keep an eye on performance metrics related to specific applications or functions. SLAs have been created to monitor the performance of the organization's electronic medical record application, Exchange server activity, financial applications, radiology systems, and general inter- and intranet activities. An SLA dashboard allows Fallon Clinic's IT team members to have real time access to various performance metrics as well as historical reporting. Drill-down capabilities allow the Clinic to easily investigate shortfalls in service compliance. Additionally, they can automatically invoke corrective actions when certain scenarios occur. "Without these tools to assist us, it would be virtually impossible to achieve and maintain the stringent SLA's that we have," said Paul. "We are confident that we can stay one step ahead by regular monitoring, reporting and analyzing performance metrics."
Heroix - The Rx for IT Health Matters
Today Fallon Clinic, Inc. has successfully launched several of its new electronic medical record modules. Heroix performance monitoring technologies have played a key role in ensuring the optimal performance - and success - of these applications and the systems that support them.
By effectively monitoring the performance of key technologies and business applications across the company's various facilities, Fallon Clinic continues to deliver on its promise to provide the best possible care for its patients.
"Heroix has helped us to further deliver on our commitment to provide advanced information access and the best possible patient care," said Paul. "When our IT operations perform optimally, we are better able to allow physicians to have immediate access to patient information to enhance their clinical decision-making. We also enable our administrative staff to have data at their fingertips to lend greater efficiency to every task they perform."
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