Health First

Healthcare provider migrates cardiology application to Red Hat with zero downtime.

Industry: Healthcare
Geography: Brevard County, Florida
Opportunity: Create a storage network system to provide consistently high performance and availability.
Solution: Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System, Fibre Channel SCSI
Applications: Cardiology PACS
Hardware: IBM SAN, DVD jukeboxes, SATA hard drives
Benefits: Dramatically increased network performance and availability, resulting in substantially increased uptime, high speed for high-definition video streaming, and improved clinical application access for those performing patient care.

Background

In 1995, three hospitals in Brevard County, Florida came together to fulfill a common mission: to improve the health of their community. Cape Canaveral Hospital, Holmes Regional Medical Center and Palm Bay Community Hospital decided to create an integrated not-for-profit healthcare delivery system by forming one entity, which they named Health First. In addition to the three hospitals, today the Health First family includes a wide range of healthcare facilities and services including a level II trauma center, a physicians group, comprehensive cardiovascular program, and a variety of Medicare and commercial health plans.

Due to Red Hat’s Cluster Suite, storage for our cardiology PACS system has experienced zero downtime to date. We feel this is phenomenal performance in a 24/7 healthcare environment where every minute of downtime affects our efficiency as a healthcare provider. Using Red Hat has improved our ability to care for our patient.

– Danny Wall, Network Engineer

Dedicated to integrating quality healthcare services with state-of-the-art technology, Health First has one centralized IT Department that seamlessly services the entire organization. The department supports more than 6,000 healthcare associates, 800 plus medical staff physicians, 6,000 PCs, and 900 applications throughout the various Health First facilities.

Health First employs a centralized Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) solution that supports the cardiology program for the entire enterprise. The PACS contains a multi-tiered data storage design that supports over 30 TB of multi-media studies. The data storage was comprised of SAN attached storage systems, NAS and DVD jukebox technologies.

Opportunity

Due to the criticality of the cardiovascular services provided to the community, Health First had a desire to increase the level of performance, reliability and uptime in the PACS. This was especially important when immediate access to prior studies were necessary in emergent situations. Having instant and constant access to historical cardiology studies improves our ability to affect timely and appropriate patient care. said Danny Wall, Network Engineer at Health First.

Health First’s PACS environment consists of a multi-tiered environment for storing cardiology studies. The second tier storage, which supported studies older than 6 months, was comprised of three Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers. “These NAS servers were not satisfying our increasing need for continuous uptime and availability. When our NAS servers experienced issues, the Health Information Technology team would receive calls around the clock due to the 24×7 operation of our cardiology services, said Wall. In addition, as part of a vendor provided solution, ten DVD jukeboxes stored thousands of archived studies Doctors were complaining that the video streaming from the DVD was slow and shaky as compared to other storage media. It became critical for us improve the performance and reliability of our storage solution,” said Wall.

Solution

To address its storage network performance issues, Wall began investigating different types of solutions. “Most importantly, we wanted to utilize the existing SAN infrastructure we had begun to build,” said Wall. Health First had an IBM SAN in place and wanted to use a combination of Fibre Channel SCSI and SATA hard drives to cost effectively address the needs of the PACS. Red Hat not only supported these technologies, but also provided the scalability and flexibility Health First required. “We chose Red Hat because its Global File System and Cluster Suite would enable us to grow our system dynamically while offering different tiers of storage,” Wall said.

Using the Red Hat Cluster Suite, Health First chose to create three tiers of storage. “Red Hat enables us to have up to 16 nodes in one cluster and to move our resources around independently between nodes. Our second tier storage, for instance, has four Samba resources, and we can transfer those over individually as needed. If we need to work on one node, we can transfer to another node. This gives us the flexibility to create high-availability configurations so our applications are always operational,” said Wall.

Health First implemented the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to simplify cluster management and scalability. Because GFS provides a consistent file system across server nodes, it enables multiple nodes to read and write to a single shared system simultaneously. “While other vendors might provide this type of parallel cluster file system, they don’t offer the scalability that GFS does. They may be limited to several thousand files on a directory. When we launched the new storage system, we already had several systems with more than 100,000 subdirectories, and multiple files in each. In the next five years, we’ll have over 1 million files in sub-directories, right off the root directory. We know that Red Hat GFS will support this growth,” said Wall.

To implement the cluster system quickly, Health First turned to Red Hat Global Professional Services. “The Red Hat team met with us, and together we mapped out how we wanted users to access the system and what type of redundancy we wanted. Within two weeks, we had the new system up and running,” said Wall. After the system was up, Wall completed Red Hat’s intensive RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) training. “The classes on GFS and Cluster Suite were especially valuable and enabled me to play in a test environment without having to worry about production,” said Wall.

Benefits

Using Red Hat, Health First dramatically increased network availability and improved physician response times. “System reliability in a healthcare environment is especially important. For physicians treating cardiac patients, every minute counts. Red Hat has decreased Health First’s physician response times by enabling the instant retrieval of patient data,” said Wall.

Red Hat also improved the speed of Health First’s third tier DVD storage, resulting in a more timely patient diagnoses. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to run SATA hard drives on our SAN that provide diagnostic-quality video streaming. Choppy video has been eliminated, and physicians can quickly research patients without having to search for additional data or wait for slow downloads,” Wall said.

Health First’s increased network performance and availability mean that physicians can now spend more time with the patient instead of searching and waiting for patient information. “Due to Red Hat’s Cluster Suite, storage for our cardiology PACS system has experienced zero downtime to date. We feel this is phenomenal performance in a 24/7 healthcare environment where every minute of downtime affects our efficiency as a healthcare provider. Using Red Hat has improved our ability to care for our patient,” said Wall.

This entry was posted under Healthcare, IBM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, North America, Global File System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.