CarePoint Health Upgrades IT With Dell and Nutanix

Highlights:

• CarePoint Health reduced capital expenses by $15 million after switching to Dell solutions
• Dell XC Web-Scale Converged Appliances, powered by Nutanix, provide medical staff with highly available technology that enables them to stay focused on patient care
• New solution aligns IT to business needs with reduced complexity and downtime, increased stability and reduced capital expenditures
• Healthcare provider to deploy a secure healthcare cloud via Dell MSite and Dell Cloud Clinical Archive to address clinical application requirements
  

Dell, Inc. announced that CarePoint Health System, which operates three hospitals and more than 55 medical practices in Hudson County, NJ, has deployed Dell technology to provide medical staff with a highly available, reliable solution that enables them to stay focused on patient care. Since deploying the Dell solution one year ago, CarePoint Health has reduced capital expenses by $15 million, value which has been added back into the business.

CarePoint Health was formed in 2012 through the acquisition of three different hospitals, each with its own infrastructure and IT processes, many of which were out of date. In addition to addressing the complexity of integrating three separate systems, the company was focused on reducing operating expenses, ensuring BC and enhancing its DR plan.

Instead of looking at these challenges from a siloed technology perspective, CarePoint Health deployed the Dell XC Web-Scale Converged Appliances powered by Nutanix, Inc. The appliances integrate Dell’s x86 server platform and Nutanix Acropolis software to provide an enterprise, hyper-converged infrastructure for virtualized environments. The appliances consolidate compute and storage into a single platform, reducing complexity and enabling CarePoint Health to deploy new workloads. With Dell XC Series appliances, CarePoint Health has the ability to scale systems and eliminate other infrastructure. Dell KACE integrates and manages the solution.

“In the past, we used to chase technology issues and provide patches, but we could not provide real value to the business. By stabilizing the infrastructure, we became more strategic and focused on aligning IT to the business and then integrating that across the whole hospital system,” said Lev Goronshteyn, CTO, CarePoint Health. “Dell provides a full stack that can address all of our needs with a software-defined infrastructure that enables faster, more reliable performance while reducing overhead and maintaining scalability for future growth.“

Improving the stability of the infrastructure was a major goal for many reasons. First, if the electronic medical record (EMR) system went down, providers would not have access to key data for patient care. Additionally, documentation still has to take place without access to the EMR, meaning providers would need to reinstate paper procedures to capture patient updates. Finally, accurately capturing charges becomes an issue which could impact revenue with mischarges.

CarePoint Health also uses Dell Managed Services to maintain its IT environment, freeing up in-house staff to pursue innovation in the core business. CarePoint Health is in the process of deploying Dell Networking switches, replacing its existing Cisco network. The Dell switches provide flexibility to deploy a software-defined network when they determine the time is right.

To address clinical application delivery needs, CarePoint Health is deploying Dell MSite, a secure healthcare cloud to host its Meditech applications. Additionally, CarePoint is deploying the Dell Cloud Clinical Archive to provide complete access to medical imaging data from the secure cloud whenever or wherever it’s needed during a downtime event.

“Our goal is to provide our medical professionals with ‘invisible IT’ that makes it easier for them to care for patients and adapt to regulatory and meaningful use changes,” said Joel Taylor, CIO, CarePoint Health. “We are on a journey to bring this type of IT to the full healthcare system, and we are pleased to have Dell be our single source provider because it makes it easier to integrate, provides more flexibility and it all works together.“

“CarePoint Health needed a flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure-one that can adapt quickly to change and has the agility to keep up with an unpredictable future,” said Dr. Nick van Terheyden, chief medical officer, Dell. “Dell’s solutions are designed from the beginning to be future-ready – based on open standards, modular and scalable to give customers like CarePoint Health the flexibility and agility needed to capitalize on every opportunity – even the ones that don’t exist yet.“

CarePoint Health also worked with Dell Financial Services (DFS) to finance the entire solution.