Cerner Corporation Gains Critical Real-Time Visibility into Cloud-Based Service Delivery with NETSCOUT
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE™ Service Assurance platform
- NETSCOUT Intelligent Data Sources
- InfiniStream® appliances
- nGenius Packet Flow Switch family
Tech Stack
- Citrix®
- Windows®
- Linux®
- Oracle®
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Cerner Corporation is a healthcare technology company that has been executing its vision to make healthcare safer and more efficient for over 30 years. The company started with the foundation of digitizing paper processes and now offers the most comprehensive array of information software, professional services, medical device integration, remote hosting, and employer health and wellness services. Cerner systems are licensed by approximately 14,000 facilities around the world and used by everyone from individual consumers to single-doctor practices, hospitals, employers, and entire countries. As a result, access to digitized patient information anytime, anywhere is critical to the medical practices that rely on Cerner’s solutions. If the access to this information is lost, even for a small amount of time, it could result in serious consequences for the patient, doctor, and Cerner. On that premise, the health of Cerner’s network and the data and applications that traverse it are critical to the success of the business and the overall user experience.
The Challenge
Cerner Corporation, a healthcare technology company, faced the challenge of assuring performance, availability, and quality for its cloud-based service for digitized patient information across medical offices and hospital systems. The company needed to maintain system responsiveness and carrier-class level network uptime of 99.999% availability. It was also crucial for Cerner to assure network and application service-level performance to protect the end-user experience. Over the years, Cerner has seen substantial growth, including a threefold increase in the size of its network, users, and the number of applications and user sessions. As a result, instant access to information both internally and externally became a critical component to Cerner’s services and a major factor in assuring customer satisfaction. In the past, when there was an issue, limited visibility resulted in Cerner operations teams diving into a lengthy investigation and resolution process that impacted and possibly jeopardized compliance with contractual SLAs. Due to the critical nature of the services offered by Cerner, SLA violations can result in negative operational and financial consequences to their clients.
The Solution
To provide comprehensive monitoring of application and network performance and to assure maximum performance, service quality, and uptime, Cerner relies on the nGenius performance management solution from NETSCOUT. The solution is comprised of the nGeniusONE™ Service Assurance platform, NETSCOUT Intelligent Data Sources, such as the InfiniStream® appliances, and the nGenius Packet Flow Switch family, which enables streamlined and scalable access to traffic flows across the network. The nGenius solution is used extensively across Cerner’s substantial physical and virtualized environments. End-to-end performance monitoring is a critical piece of Cerner’s service delivery strategy. The nGenius solution monitors Cerner’s environment alerting the team to potential issues and performance anomalies to help resolve problems and assure service delivery and availability. The nGenius solution provides the IT organization with comprehensive visibility across its network, applications, and its Citrix-based services and enables performance management, proactive service health management, and hierarchical troubleshooting with task-oriented workflows for rapid problem triage and resolution. These advanced capabilities enable the Cerner team to protect their services against degradation and downtime, optimize service performance, and simplify IT operations through a common solution that is leveraged across the network, application, and server groups at Cerner.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Hospital Inventory Management
The hospital supply chain team is responsible for ensuring that the right medical supplies are readily available to clinicians when and where needed, and to do so in the most efficient manner possible. However, many of the systems and processes in use at the cancer center for supply chain management were not best suited to support these goals. Barcoding technology, a commonly used method for inventory management of medical supplies, is labor intensive, time consuming, does not provide real-time visibility into inventory levels and can be prone to error. Consequently, the lack of accurate and real-time visibility into inventory levels across multiple supply rooms in multiple hospital facilities creates additional inefficiency in the system causing over-ordering, hoarding, and wasted supplies. Other sources of waste and cost were also identified as candidates for improvement. Existing systems and processes did not provide adequate security for high-cost inventory within the hospital, which was another driver of cost. A lack of visibility into expiration dates for supplies resulted in supplies being wasted due to past expiry dates. Storage of supplies was also a key consideration given the location of the cancer center’s facilities in a dense urban setting, where space is always at a premium. In order to address the challenges outlined above, the hospital sought a solution that would provide real-time inventory information with high levels of accuracy, reduce the level of manual effort required and enable data driven decision making to ensure that the right supplies were readily available to clinicians in the right location at the right time.
Case Study
Gas Pipeline Monitoring System for Hospitals
This system integrator focuses on providing centralized gas pipeline monitoring systems for hospitals. The service they provide makes it possible for hospitals to reduce both maintenance and labor costs. Since hospitals may not have an existing network suitable for this type of system, GPRS communication provides an easy and ready-to-use solution for remote, distributed monitoring systems System Requirements - GPRS communication - Seamless connection with SCADA software - Simple, front-end control capability - Expandable I/O channels - Combine AI, DI, and DO channels
Case Study
Driving Digital Transformations for Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices
Diagnostic devices play a vital role in helping to improve healthcare delivery. In fact, an estimated 60 percent of the world’s medical decisions are made with support from in vitrodiagnostics (IVD) solutions, such as those provided by Roche Diagnostics, an industry leader. As the demand for medical diagnostic services grows rapidly in hospitals and clinics across China, so does the market for IVD solutions. In addition, the typically high cost of these diagnostic devices means that comprehensive post-sales services are needed. Wanteed to improve three portions of thr IVD:1. Remotely monitor and manage IVD devices as fixed assets.2. Optimizing device availability with predictive maintenance.3. Recommending the best IVD solution for a customer’s needs.
Case Study
HaemoCloud Global Blood Management System
1) Deliver a connected digital product system to protect and increase the differentiated value of Haemonetics blood and plasma solutions. 2) Improve patient outcomes by increasing the efficiency of blood supply flows. 3) Navigate and satisfy a complex web of global regulatory compliance requirements. 4) Reduce costly and labor-intensive maintenance procedures.
Case Study
Harnessing real-time data to give a holistic picture of patient health
Every day, vast quantities of data are collected about patients as they pass through health service organizations—from operational data such as treatment history and medications to physiological data captured by medical devices. The insights hidden within this treasure trove of data can be used to support more personalized treatments, more accurate diagnosis and more advanced preparative care. But since the information is generated faster than most organizations can consume it, unlocking the power of this big data can be a struggle. This type of predictive approach not only improves patient care—it also helps to reduce costs, because in the healthcare industry, prevention is almost always more cost-effective than treatment. However, collecting, analyzing and presenting these data-streams in a way that clinicians can easily understand can pose a significant technical challenge.
