Maine-based Plixer International’s Scrutinizer software provides instant ROI with network insight.
Portland, ME – Mercy Hospital is a nonprofit community hospital sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, Regional Community of Portland. Established in 1918 by the Catholic Diocese of Portland and the Sisters of Mercy, Mercy Hospital’s mission is to provide compassionate, clinically excellent health care, especially to the poor and disadvantaged. Mercy Hospital is a member of Catholic Health East, a multi-institutional Catholic health system serving communities through regional healthcare systems in 11 eastern states from Maine to Florida.
The Challenge
In the midst of a national recession, Mercy Hospital was undergoing a massive reorganization and transitional period meant to absorb some of the negative financial affects of the down turned economy. A large part of the transitional focus was on the IT department, where a potential for greater efficiency existed. At the network level is Senior Network Engineer Stan DeFreese, the man responsible for a large portion of the Mercy Hospital network spanning the hospital’s main location, a brand new campus, 15 remote sites, and the connection to the hospital’s data center in Philadelphia.
During the reorganization, DeFreese was required to simultaneously juggle his usual responsibilities as well as new responsibilities resulting from restructuring. He knew the hospital’s networking team needed a robust network monitoring software tool to supplement his position. Although they had a corporate standard network monitoring program, it wasn’t as helpful at the local level as DeFreese was hoping.
At the time, a large portion of Mercy Hospital’s network traffic flow was engaged by its electronic medical record system, MEDITECH. Having a monitoring and automation system would simply the process and ensure information was safely reaching its final destination.
Because the point of the reorganization was to cut down on costs, DeFreese knew that finding a new, potentially costly solution for monitoring the network would be a tough sell to management. Instead, he needed to find an inexpensive option. He wasn’t aware that the solution was right in front of him the whole time.
The Solution
About eight years prior to the reorganization, Mercy Hospital’s network team purchased hardware through Plixer International, Inc. which included an early iteration of the company’s powerful Scrutinizer NetFlow and Flow Analyzer. DeFreese recognized that the program had grown much more powerful over the years; it was just a matter of taking it off the shelf, dusting it off, and getting it operational.
“When we originally obtained Scrutinizer, we didn’t really have our tentacles in the network yet,” DeFreese explained. “Streamlining came over the next five years, and Scrutinizer just never made it off the shelf.”
Once the software was implemented, DeFreese was impressed at the level of network visibility the program provided. “Scrutinizer sees disparate applications, top talkers, and how much bandwidth each one is using- all from a much more detailed application/packet level perspective. Plixer’s solution answers questions like, ‘Which device is taking up bandwidth and utilization of application servers?’ Basically, it gives us a level of control and analysis that we’ve never had before.”
It turns out that Mercy Hospital got Scrutinizer up and running just in time for a crucial project. Mercy Hospital was gearing up to implement a locally-housed ambulatory electronic medical record (AEMR) system for both remote sites and main locations. The AEMR would communicate directly with several different aspects of the network infrastructure, including OR and MR applications that communicate directly back to the core medical record. With Scrutinizer, DeFreese has been able to test how the new AEMR system will affect the network’s bandwidth so Mercy Hospital can plan accordingly.
The Benefits
After Scrutinizer was put in place, DeFreese almost immediately recognized a huge problem. The hospital had been paying huge monthly bills for a transparent LAN service TLS. When DeFreese undertook analysis with Scrutinizer, collecting data from different protocols and connection peers, the detailed reports revealed an incredible truth: that they were paying for a gigabyte TLS connection, but they weren’t even using 50 megabytes. By adjusting their subscription, they began to save between $80,000 and $100,000 a year.
DeFreese also used the NetFlow collector to adjust network traffic paths to better suit business needs. Early in its implementation, the software displayed how a client in the local server that handled OR, surgery, and similar data was taking up nearly 20 percent of all communication to the data center. Gathering this information allowed DeFreese to adjust the traffic paths to match processes.
Some of the benefits the program has offered Mercy Hospital are with simplifying information. “Scrutinizer takes a complicated situation and makes it understandable,” remarked DeFreese. “Graphs and the solution’s simplistic but comprehensive layout break down the situation for the end user- especially CIOs and CTOs who might not have the engineering experience to understand the raw data.”
DeFreese also noted that Plixer’s support team has gone above and beyond expectations to help him fix any problems he has. “If I can’t fix it, they’ll work with me over WebEx to fix it- and if that doesn’t work, they will be on site as quickly as possible to get the job done.”
