University Medical Center New Orleans Delivers Quality Healthcare Services With NetApp

“University Medical Center (UMC) New Orleans, a public-private partnership with the State of Louisiana, was built and founded by the State and is the first of five hospitals in the LCMC Health system with Epic deployed as the EMR,” said Tanya Townsend, CIO, LCMC Health. “Sapphire Health’s understanding of our requirements, CMA Technology Solutions’ delivery of the core Epic infrastructure, and NetApp All Flash FAS enabled us to meet consolidation and integration requirements. We quickly built out two new data centers capable of delivering critical patient data to thousands of clinical users.“

LCMC Health is the parent of Children’s Hospital, Touro Infirmary, UMC New Orleans, New Orleans East Hospital, and West Jefferson Medical Center. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina decimated two of Louisiana’s major teaching hospitals, the State of Louisiana and LCMC Health unveiled a new facility, University Medical Center (UMC) New Orleans, the largest teaching hospital in the state. Because of a tight launch schedule, UMC had only three months to deploy and test an IT infrastructure before the hospital opened. The technology team sought to give physicians, clinicians, and radiologists rapid access to patient information through Epic electronic medical records (EMRs) and GE Centricity PACS applications using virtual desktops accessed from shared thin-client terminals.

Understanding UMC’s requirements and LCMC’s desire to create an infrastructure that could be easily rolled out to other hospitals within its network, Sapphire Health (Sapphire Cloud LLC) teamed with NetApp, Inc. and CMA Technology, Inc. to deliver an Epic solution that exceeded expectations. Partner CMA Technology simplified the delivery of the core Epic infrastructure, which included NetApp storage, Cisco UCS servers, VMware virtualization, Commvault enterprise backup, F5 load balancers, and professional services.

UMC’s deployment was streamlined because of the ease with which the NetApp AFF8080 system running ONTAP software was deployed. UMC has the best of both worlds: the speed of SSDs combined with clustered storage controllers for HA and non-disruptive operations. In addition to enabling virtual desktop performance, NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) is improving I/O for critical applications such as GE Centricity PACS and Varian oncology software, sustaining sub-millisecond storage latency for more than 300 VMs.

With its solution, UMC:

• Recomposed the entire pool of approximately 1,500 virtual desktops supporting Epic EMRs in just a few hours, a task that would have taken days to complete on spinning drives
• Reduced response time exceptions within Epic by approximately 80%*
• Enabled caregivers to make faster, more confident decisions based on real-time data
• Can scale desktops, even during peak times, without compromising performance
• Consolidated multiple applications and offers new services to users
• Decreased average CPU usage from 41% to 17%*
  

*Statistics from June 2016, when UMC migrated Epic out of Shreveport, Louisiana.