Great Expressions Dental Centers Leverages Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Great Expressions Dental Centers, one of the largest national dental service organizations, is leveraging Nutanix to build faster and more secure solutions.

Nutanix software has enabled the team to simplify its datacenter operations and decrease operational overhead, allowing them to focus on initiatives that enhance the overall patient experience.

The healthcare industry continues to undergo rapid changes, putting increasing pressure on healthcare organizations to embrace innovative and agile IT methodologies in order to improve the quality of patient care and reduce operational expenses. Security, regulatory compliance and mobility are among the priorities for healthcare CIOs, CTOs and their teams.

By embracing new dental technologies, Great Expressions has witnessed rapid growth in its business and datacenters. With 300 office sites, each with its own separately-managed network, storage and compute resources, its team needed a solution to consolidate and more efficiently manage its data in a single site.

The team sought a technology solution that would reliably provide efficient healthcare delivery, enhance collaboration between end-users, including dentists, healthcare technicians and office staff, and streamline operational processes. Great Expressions chose Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) software with the AHV hypervisor for these purposes.

Before Nutanix, the Great Expressions IT team devoted 80% of its time to support activities and only 20% to value-add strategic projects. With Nutanix HCI software, It has streamlined its processes and cut troubleshooting time in half, allowing its IT team to invest time toward new, long-term strategic projects. The use of the Nutanix software also enabled the team’s ability to support digital radiography, ingesting and distributing X-Rays to speed their time to diagnoses. With these improvements, doctors can view these images in near real-time, allowing them to share with patients and specialists.

Great Expressions also participated in the Nutanix Early Access Program (EA) for Xi Leap, Nutanix’s DR as a Service (DRaaS) solution. Xi Leap is used to backup applications in case of a disaster or application impacting incident, which can affect an on-premises deployment. In the healthcare industry, it is crucial that doctors can access patient data without delay, especially in the event of an emergency.

After the Xi Leap EA test, the IT team and doctors realized the Xi Leap solution could provide them with a newfound peace of mind. In the event of a failure, they could experience a maximum of one-hour RTO – as opposed to weeks needed for another solution – because all of their applications and workloads could be recovered by the Xi Leap service.

“Since deploying the Nutanix HCI software in our datacenter, our focus has shifted to thinking strategically and automating processes to provide a better experience for patients,” said Todd Rogers, infrastructure manager, Great Expressions. “Implementing a system that allows for one-click updates and simple manageability has been critical to our increased success and to our ability to provide a superior end-user experience for doctors and patients. We look forward to continuing our customer journey with Nutanix and creating a hybrid datacenter for our business.“

“For the healthcare industry, keeping up with the pace of innovation today is paramount,” said Keith Moran, VP sales, central US, Nutanix. “Our customers are eager to take advantage of the latest technological advancements, but many challenges exist in advancing their infrastructure into the multi-cloud era . Working closely with our team, Great Expressions was able to remove labor-intensive, complex systems from their environment, enabling them to innovate, spend more time on critical new projects, and ultimately, configure their environment to secure critical data. We’re excited to help more customers across the healthcare industry find a technology solution that shifts their focus to what really matters: their patients.“