County Health Agency Assures Quality Performance of Cloud-based EHR Platform

The healthcare agency was implementing a Cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform at over 20 locations, replacing a previous siloed solution operating on six different servers. However, they began experiencing issues with the patient records system, which interoperates with the agency’s Picture Archiving and Communications Services (PACs), radiology, and pharmacy services. The third-party vendor denied these performance problems were in any way associated with the EHR SaaS platform. As issues continued across the organization, the agency’s CTO and IT team became prominent organizational targets for user frustrations. The agency had recently added new clinical facilities that expanded the geographic reach of in-county care services. As a result, the IT team had expanded their two-site data center operations to a distributed network of six hospital and clinical facilities. IT needed visibility into the network and application environments at these new locations, including monitoring virtualized desktops. Since some of the EHR performance issues were originating at these new locations, the lack of visibility furthered hampered the IT team when it came to trouble-shooting EHR issues.

The customer is a leading U.S. County government healthcare agency that supports over 500,000 annual patient visits. The agency is focused on extending its heritage of providing high-quality patient care to underserved citizens, leveraging the dedicated efforts of over 20,000 staff members and employing a 5-year patient improvement care plan. The agency has introduced several next-generation technologies that improve patient care, including an expanded Contact Center that handles higher volumes of patient calls and an electronic patient consultation platform which reduces the turnaround times for appointments. The agency is a long-time NETSCOUT customer, using the nGeniusONE service assurance platform and nGenius InfiniStream packet capture appliances to coordinate network monitoring from two data center locations.