WellSpan Health optimizes electronic medical record performance and reliability with AppSense
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- AppSense Performance Manager
- Cerner Millennium PowerChart
- HP1280 back-end servers
Tech Stack
- Citrix
- Windows Operating System
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
WellSpan Health is an integrated health system serving over 650,000 people in south central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. The organization operates more than 65 patient care sites and is staffed by 8,000 physicians, employees, volunteers, board members, and auxiliaries. WellSpan Health is dedicated to providing high-quality healthcare services and has been using the Cerner Classic PowerChart Application as part of its inpatient clinical care record for many years. The organization sought to improve its electronic medical record performance and reliability to better serve its large patient base and support its extensive network of healthcare professionals.
The Challenge
WellSpan Health needed to implement and upgrade their inpatient clinical care records system using the Cerner Millennium PowerChart application. However, the application required more processing power and resources than their existing Citrix servers could handle effectively. The performance of the Citrix environment diminished significantly, causing clinicians to be reluctant to migrate to the new application due to slow response times. The IT department explored various ways to enhance performance, including reviewing the Cerner hardware platform and the Citrix environment, but client-side response times were still not reduced to the needed extent. Logon times with Millennium PowerChart ranged from 30 to 90 seconds, which was an average of 20 seconds slower than the Cerner Classic application. This response lag was equivalent to adding 13 full-time employees due to the non-productive logon time.
The Solution
WellSpan Health's IT department invested in a new infrastructure, including new HP1280 back-end servers, faster Citrix servers (Dual 3.2 GHz), and upgraded the Windows operating system. Despite these upgrades, performance was still not sufficiently improved. Cerner recommended that WellSpan consider using AppSense Performance Manager. Upon installing AppSense Performance Manager, WellSpan immediately optimized CPU and memory usage, delivering faster and more reliable performance. Logon times were lowered to under 20 seconds, with users gaining access to the Millennium PowerChart Application in just 10-12 seconds. The concurrent user count increased by 100%, with no performance degradation, even under severe testing conditions. Memory savings of up to 300 MB per instance were realized, enabling IT to support more users with less memory. The number of servers required was reduced by 20%, allowing for easier and more cost-effective management of the server farm. Additionally, improved business continuity was achieved with more fail-over servers available due to the blended Citrix farm.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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