IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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HealthShare NZ chooses Emulex to help deliver healthcare
Thu, 6th Nov 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

HealthShare NZ has chosen Emulex Corporation to monitor its shared services agency’s network.

Emulex provides network connectivity, monitoring and management, and HealthShare NZ is a New Zealand based non-profit shared services provider for healthcare, jointly owned by five District Health Boards (DHBs) all with the same 10GB ethernet IT infrastructure.

HealthShare has chosen the EndaceProbe Intelligence Network Recorder (INR) and Endace Vision Network Visibility Software to monitor its network.

The DHBs have more than 780,000 patients collectively, and these Emulex Endace products will help HealthShare provide quicker and more reliable access to patient medical data.

In order to maintain its funding, 77 percent of which comes through public taxes, and patient base, each DHB must continue to provide quality service with low operational expenditure.

HealthShare has recently experienced a number of network related problems. Post-remediation was slow - in order to find the root cause and resolve the issue, inter-departmental team members had to manually analyse log files using their laptops as well as WireShark and spanned network ports.

“As a service provider to five DHBs, we have to quickly discover the cause of IT-related issues that restrict access to patient medical data," says  Grant Ardern, chief technology officer, HealthShare NZ.

"The EndaceProbe INR and EndaceVision solution gave us instant return on investment (ROI) when an MRI file could not be accessed. We resolved the issue within 6 minutes where before, this issue could have taken us days to resolve as we combed through thousands of network log files.

“We now have 100 percent confidence that when the phone rings, we can quickly pinpoint an issue and resolve it since we have all the facts and are not second guessing what the issue could be," he says.

The virtualisation capabilities of the Emulex products solve the problem HealthShare had to track and trace real world events easily when customers call as the products allow complete and efficient access to the network traffic responsible for network events.

Furthermore, EndaceVision allows analysts to quickly pinpoint the cause of an issue and can eliminate that which is unnecessary such as false positives and previous inter-departmental conflicts.

“Faster time-to-resolution (TTR) in determining the true root cause ultimately enhanced the management of inter-departmental relationships while allowing for maximum resource utilisation across affected IT teams,” says Emulex.

Each of the five DHBs will receive the service levels required, 100 percent traffic capture and large rotating bugger of long-term storage as well as providing post remediation support and ensuring the DHBs have patient data when they need it.

“HealthShare NZ is a superb example of an organisation that requires the utmost in network security and maximum uptime, as patient data is not only highly confidential, it is critically important to have access to it at any time, while ensuring data is safe and uncompromised,” says Ali Hedayati, senior vice president and general manager, Network Visibility Products, Emulex.

“The Emulex solution for HealthShare has given them the rapid TTR, complete network performance monitoring and maximised IT resource utilisation that is crucial to any company’s bottom line, especially a non-profit that relies on public funding to grow its organisation.  This also benefits HealthShare’s patients by helping to ensure that patient data is available when needed.”