About Mariano Marcos Memorial Hospital and Medical Center
Mariano Marcos Memorial Hospital and Medical Center (MMMH & MC) is the biggest public hospital in Llocos Norte province, in the city of Laoag, founded in 1972. MMMH & MC are the only level-3 hospitals (the highest level) in the region that offer CT. In 2012, MMMH & MC started their digital transformation, with iHomis (hospital information system) & MedSys supported by the DOH (Department of Health). With more and more systems being digitalized and patient quantity increasing, the IT infrastructure had become a critical challenge.
Customer Challenges
Performance Issues
Their IT infrastructure had become a drag on the efficiency. It took 5-10 minutes for the billing department to export a detailed billing report for patients, who were increasingly unsatisfied with the long wait.
Limited hardware in the Pharmacy Department caused complains that there was no response from server while printing monthly pharmacy reports. The Medical Social Service Classification Department complained about the lack of response from the MSSC module of the server. These two departments could only export data from the server with the assistance of IT staff.
The discharge procedure took about 3+ minutes per patient and hospitalization procedure taking about 5+ minutes per patient, because the Payment Department needed to wait for the system to feedback invoice information. This means an average of 3,000 minutes wasted daily due to low server performance.
High Risk of Failure without High Availability Design
The physical server was designed without any redundancy, meaning server failure would bring down the entire hospital’ s operation.
They had a high risk of losing data, as there is no automatic, high frequency backup solution for critical applications.
Legacy System’ s Influence on IT Department’ Workload
Most of the IT department’ s resources were spent dealing with performance issues due to the legacy system.
Hospital service would often (monthly) stop for 3-4 hours if a corresponding system was in planned maintenance, for there is no redundancy design.
Sangfor Solution
Sangfor consolidated all outdated servers into only 3 hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, to support all hospital IT applications.
Solution Values
Improved Efficiency
- With Sangfor SSD caching technology, striping and large-page mechanism to accelerate database performance, the Pharmacy and MSS departments can now export their reports in seconds, without going to the IT department for help.
- The waiting time for discharge has been reduced to a few seconds, long enough for the billing & payment departments to generate invoices.
Data Protection
- Ransomware had been disrupting the production systems consistently. Every time it happened, there would be huge data loss. Now, the core systems recover easily from ransomware attacks, with the help of local backup and continuous data protection.
- CDP backs up data every 5 seconds, to minimize data loss.
- The current infrastructure is an enhanced system that can recover lost data in case of accidental disk/server failure.
Business Continuity
- The critical application, iHomis, is now elastic with Sangfor DRS & DRX. aCloud can automatically adjust system resources to cope with peak business hours.
- The IT department doesn’ t need to shut down servers for planned maintenance. With Sangfor’ s live migration technology, applications can now be migrated to another node without any service interruption.
- The built-in HA can auto-switch workloads from one node to another, in the event of hardware failure.