The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every aspect of life, uniting governments, the scientific community, and healthcare workers around the world in the struggle to get it under control.
The pandemic has been a forceful catalyst for healthcare IT Ops change. Infrastructure health and performance optimization has never been more critical to serve the needs of life science research, drug discovery, and hospital care. A recent study published by Accenture highlights some of the heroic and drastic business continuity challenges many IT Ops teams have had to overcome in the wake of this virus.
Accenture cites Gartner’s recent Business Continuity Survey which shows just 12% of organizations are highly prepared for the impact of coronavirus. Accenture further opines that smart leaders must focus on how they can best protect their people, serve their customers, and stabilize business continuity.
A Special Healthcare IT Report on COVID-19
Virtana just published a special report, based on interviews with two major North American hospitals, to better understand the complexities and stress that unforeseen and unplanned events can place on organizations. The focus is on healthcare and the pandemic, but business continuity planning can help all organizations.
What stood out were the overwhelming gaps in preparedness across business lines, critical application infrastructure to support unforeseen surges, and the impact on hospital revenues and resources. This pandemic exposed significant gaps in business continuity (BC) planning and resource allocation. Even the most detailed plans failed to capture supply chain vulnerability to system-wide disruptions.
Pandemic conditions place stress on logistics, supply chains, and ERP and EHR systems. Also affected are first responders, critical staffing, and other essential resources and services.
All of these changes are likely to drive healthcare IT (HIT) organizations to:
- Increase reliance on AI/predictive analytics
- Connect EHR systems into the supply chain for automated ordering, and develop supply “exchanges” for alternate sourcing
- Expand the use of telemedicine to support remote workers and team collaboration
- Tie streaming video to diagnostic equipment to continuously and safely track self-isolated patient progress, reducing risk to front-line workers and lowering consumption of PPE
- Support rapid deployment of remote facilities (tents, shelters, and non-traditional structures) for triage and overflow capacity
- Inform and guide the public in self-isolation with AI-driven chatbots
- Increase emphasis on payer/provider/patient data sharing and collaboration through information exchanges to help spot fraud and entitlements and to accelerate authorization and reimbursement
For IT organizations, AI presents several technical challenges, chief among which are more diverse workloads and infrastructure performance requirements that more closely resemble high performance computing (HPC) systems than the enterprise systems that administrators are used to.
VirtualWisdom’s analytics apply AI, ML, and heuristics across full application infrastructure sets to identify problems before they cause downtime, determine root cause, eliminate shared infrastructure conflicts, right-size infrastructure sets to task, automatically discover application topologies, automatically apply best-practice monitoring, eliminate alarm storms, and more.
Real World, Real Challenges
TEXAS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
IT administration for a leading Texas university hospital is challenging because it involves researchers, clinicians, and students, all with different needs. An IT leader described the current pandemic-related environment this way:
- Income-generating patient services have been eliminated.
- Spending on COVID-19 research has increased significantly.
- IT headcount has been cut 14%, and the remaining staff is on reduced work hours.
- Current projects requiring IT support include a multi-petabyte storage migration, Office365 implementation, and transitions to a new EHR system and to ServiceNow. No adjustments to project priorities or timelines have been made.
“The Virtana platform helped us architect a very efficient and highly optimized environment, so we’ve been able to manage the unexpected increase in workload without outages or impact to our users. We’re also able to better manage the resources that we have despite the budget and staffing changes, allowing us to concentrate on the critical projects already in flight.”
LARGE MIDWEST HOSPITAL NETWORK
As hospital networks seek to add new services, post-acquisition systems integration causes some very difficult challenges – redundant applications, incompatible EHR systems, and incompatible database structures. A large hospital network described their new normal:
- A significant reduction in elective services, resulting in a quarterly loss of nearly $400M.
- Mandatory worker time off, furloughs, and an increase in employee turnover.
The network of care facilities consists of twelve hospitals and over 175 clinics, 50,000 users, 1,800 applications, and 3PBs of storage, which is growing rapidly.
We replicate operations between two data centers, and a recent hospital acquisition added another two data centers. Plans call for the consolidation of applications and data centers, merging of two EHR systems, and moving workloads to the cloud.
“The Virtana platform is the only suite of tools we’ve found that helps with problem determination and profiling application demands on the underlying infrastructure. This helps us size our new environment, identify misbehaving applications, and project cloud costs and performance before spending any money to move our applications. That takes a lot of the stress and risk out of implementing our hybrid IT strategy.”
Post-COVID, HIT organizations will need greater agility to support the changes required by the “new normal.”
Deeper insights into the interdependencies of infrastructure and applications are crucial to maintaining SLAs and optimizing system performance under increasingly constrained budgets. Hybrid cloud environments impact IT agility because administrators must use one set of tools to manage and monitor cloud resources and another for on-premises resources. Administrators are then forced to stitch together a disjointed set of partial views from individual tools to get an approximation of their overall environment’s performance.
Virtualized resources, common in hospital settings, add another level of complexity by obscuring true system performance and resource utilization. This makes it difficult to predict and prevent such issues as poor virtual machine performance or application disruptions when migrating them to the cloud. Bridging these gaps calls for real-time visibility into system and application performance, using tools that support the complexities of the post-COVID era.
The Virtana platforms accelerate scientific research and discovery and patient care in the following ways:
- Accelerating problem resolution for less downtime so more time is spent conducting research or on patient care
- Providing efficient capacity and cost management for reduced operational costs and a greater return on IT investment
- Simulating and automating workload migration and placement for reduced migration risk and more informed purchase decisions
- Optimizing both system and application performance for reduced time to discovery or faster diagnosis and patient treatment
COVID-19 has been the single largest shock to the global healthcare system, serving as a wake-up call and causing IT organizations to rethink and revise their BC plans. When the next shock comes, will you be ready?
1 Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Business Continuity Survey Shows Just 12 Percent of Organizations Are Highly Prepared for Coronavirus.” Gartner, March 10, 2020. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-03-10-gartner-business-continuity-survey-shows-just-twelve-percernt-of-organizations-are-highly-prepared-for-coronavirsu
James Bettencourt
