Florida-Based Halifax Health Chooses Pure FlashArray

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Halifax Health, a community-based hospital system in Florida, chose Pure to optimize clinical workflows and to deliver HA of mission-critical applications  including its Meditech electronic health record (EHR) system to enable its staff to ensure care continuity and better optimize patient outcomes.

Setting the Stage for Greater BC
A trailblazer, Halifax Health, which provides a continuum of healthcare services through a network of organizations with facilities including a tertiary hospital, 2 community hospitals, a cancer treatment center with 5 outreach locations, the area’s largest hospice and a center for inpatient rehabilitation, was the first healthcare organization to cluster Meditech using Windows failover clustering. It became the driving force behind Meditech’s current HA solution, which is installed in over half of Meditech organizations.

Clustering not only ensured greater availability of the Meditech EHR system and other apps, but also improved Halifax Health’s DR and rapid restore capabilities in the face of natural disasters and prepared the IT team to launch new apps quickly amid Covid-19.

Need for Improved Resiliency and Reduced Complexity
Even with these measures in place, Halifax Health faced a trio of challenges availability, performance and security of mission-critical systems, while doing so cost-effectively. In addition, due to its location in Florida, the user must be able to stay up and running during tropical storms and hurricanes. Medical staff needs immediate access to clinical apps and health information whenever they need it, and rely on IT to do so.

To meet these challenges, Halifax Health wanted to create multiple instances of its Meditech environment. However, this required an additional investment in the existing approach, with additional legacy storage, networking and compute all of which required more licensing to make everything work. It took the opportunity to revisit its entire infrastructure and selected Pure FlashArray as the foundation for its Meditech instances, allowing it to cluster storage with three arrays with the resources for one.

“We were the first hospital to cluster our Meditech environment, so we were blazing new trails. Our investment in Pure allows us to retain full control of our infrastructure, without running up operating expenses,” said Mike Marques, Halifax Health’s VP and CIO of IT. “We’ve had nothing but 100 percent uptime ever since. Pure is going to play an important role in our Meditech architecture as we move forward. And the best part about that is that we can do it without a lot of additional infrastructure and complexity.“

Visible Impact and Covid-19 Connection
More than 200 applications, including all of Halifax Health’s tier-1 applications, such as PACS, TeleTracking and several EMRs, run on Pure. Halifax Health has reduced its RPO and RTO by moving to Pure. While its infrastructure has grown, its IT team can manage the same infrastructure with the same, if not fewer resources.

It also has cut the time spent managing storage by 75%, which proved especially valuable early in the pandemic when the hospital system needed to develop in-house telemedicine and virtual waiting room applications rapidly. The IT team was able to redeploy staff to implement the TeleHealth platform in 3 days, a high-impact transformation in a short time.

“Halifax Health is an amazing example of how healthcare organizations can transform the role of IT, enabling resiliency and agility and supporting the innovation necessary to care for their patients. By retiring legacy infrastructure and making a strategic investment in a modern data platform from Pure, the team was able to remove years of technical debt that made Halifax Health’s environment complex and, more importantly, they were able to give clinicians and patients an optimized clinical experience,” said Josh Gluck, VP of global healthcare technology strategy, Pure. “Storage reliability, resilience, cost-control, security, performance and operational simplicity aren’t just non-negotiables; they’re game-changers for providers, especially those under pressure to innovate and adapt to new challenges as they improve patient outcomes.“

With performing, resilient and easy-to-manage storage, Halifax Health can accelerate its core applications with fewer resources, delivering the best patient care today and well into the future. Pure’s simplicity enables Halifax Health IT team members to focus on optimizing and enhancing IT, instead of spending time managing storage. For example, the virtual disk expansion process is 10x faster, which is easier on staff and reduces the opportunity for mistakes. The organization can cross-train engineers and increase staffing efficiencies, while minimizing any technology-related frustrations. Pure allows IT resources to be redeployed in the organization to ensure patients and clinicians are receiving the highest level of care possible.

Case study: Halifax Health Keeps Healthcare Apps Running