Leading Dutch Hospital Optimizes IT Operations with
eG Enterprise

Groene Hart Ziekenhuis (GHZ): Company Background

The Groene Hart Ziekenhuis (GHZ) in Gouda is a modern, flexible, efficient and enterprising hospital servicing approximately 300,000 residents of the Green Heart area of the Netherlands. Each year, the hospital provides inpatient and outpatient care to 140,000 patients. Quality of service to its clients is paramount for the GHZ.

In 2014, the hospital transitioned to a centralized infrastructure running on Citrix to improve security and manageability. The tech stack includes:

• Over 550 servers are used for accessing more than two hundred key medical applications
• Several web interface servers and a data collector
• Microsoft SQL server for storing data
• VMware vSphere for virtualizing all the key server applications
• RES Software for automated management of the entire infrastructure

Initially, the requirement for using eG Enterprise in 2014 was to identify the root-causes of performance problems. Staff and patients were being impacted by slow applications but the monitoring tools employed by the GHZ ITOps team could only tell them if systems were up or down.

By being able to pin-point the root-causes of performance slowdowns with eG Enterprise, the team was able to free up time and reallocate budget from fire-fighting to improving the IT infrastructure.

Today's Challenges

Today, the focus has shifted from firefighting a new deployment to being pro-active and providing excellent end-user experiences to sta and patients. It is also about being as efficient as possible with the resources available.

To support the 2,000 employees, the ITOps team consists of 6 administrators working in shifts, with each one responsible for around 250 servers in their shift. As the number of servers required by the hospital has grown from 400 to 550, there is pressure to do more with the same amount of people and budget, while maintaining a reliable and stable infrastructure that their end-users need.

How the Hospital is Benefiting from eG Enterprise

• The hospital is able to monitor and manage more servers with the same amount of staff as eG Enterprise helps the team be more efficient
• Pro-active alerts helps the team remediate problems before they start to snowball and require more time and resources to fix
• Downtime has reduced to a minimum enabling the IT team to focus on the improvement of IT infrastructure rather than firefighting the existing infrastructure
• Reduced the need for outside consultants, and are able to allocate that budget to improving the IT infrastructure
• Big IT outages or problems have reduced significantly since the introduction of eG Enterprise and today the team can focus on having full control and visibility into their IT environment
• The hospital staff have full confidence in IT to be able to deliver to their needs, enabling them to be productive at work, providing excellent quality patient care, and no negative media coverage

From Fire-Fighting to Striving for 100% uptime

The hospital must deliver the best care it can to its patients and IT plays a big role in this. Medical and administration staff depend on IT systems to deliver quality patient care and any slow downs or outages impact that.

The GHZ IT team constantly looks for ways to modernize the IT environment and uses the latest technologies and software releases available.

Having full control of the IT environment is particularly important. The six administrators need to know what the status and performance is of all their servers at any one time, and be alerted the moment something deviates from normal operations.

The support from eG is fantastic, if we encounter something that we need attention with the team responds fast and accurate. Etienne Van Beek ICT Technisch Beheer  |  Download Case Study

 

The Solution: How eG Enterprise is Helping GHZ

After the initial deployment in 2014, eG Enterprise quickly helped the team identify the areas that were causing outages and performance degradation. GHZ estimates that fixing those issues allowed the hospital to reallocate over € 125,000 worth of work hours and external consultants to improving and upgrading the IT infrastructure.

Today, eG Enterprise is helping GHZ to run a tight ship by allowing the team to focus on infrastructure management and upgrades instead of being pulled into escalating IT performance problems. When IT problems do occur, there is the potential for them to snowball quickly, so eG Enterprise helps the administrators be more efficient and save time by remediating problems before they impact the end-user experience.

Using eG Enterprise, the team can get fast and actionable insights on how to solve the issues fast without needing to spend extra money on hiring the right consultants for this.

The platform is now so embedded in the day-to-day workflow that it is part of the daily routine and the team knows immediately what the health status is of the environment and can directly focus their attention on whatever is needed.

Additionally, the team doesn't want to be flooded with alerts during their daily work routine. That's why the built in AIOps features such as dynamic thresholds on resource usage is a time saver. There are always going to be periods when usage is higher than normal and eG Enterprise must learn that at these times the normal thresholds are likely to be breached but it's not necessarily an indicator of a problem, just network congestion.

Finally, as GHZ is now focused on upgrading and improving the IT infrastructure, it gives them confidence knowing that every upgrade and/or replacement that they make can be managed and monitored by eG Enterprise and they don't have to search for new monitoring solutions.