Customer Spotlight: Mercy Hospital Saves More Than $80,000 by Just Dusting Off Some Old Tools

Mercy Hospital is a not-for-profit 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 the recession, Mercy Hospital was undergoing a massive reorganization and transitional period meant to absorb some of the negative financial affects of the downturned economy. A large part of the transitional focus was on the IT department, where a potential for greater efficiency existed. Drill down even further to the network level to find 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.

DeFreese elaborates: “With all of the reorganization going on, I had to wear a lot of hats—thus making it difficult to simultaneously handle my usual responsibilities. At this point, we were going to need a really robust network monitoring software to supplement my position.” There was a corporate standard network monitoring program, but it turned out it wasn’t as helpful at the local level as DeFreese was hoping.

A large portion of Mercy Hospital’s traffic flow was engaged by its electronic medical record (EMR) system (MEDITECH). A monitoring and automation system would make it much easier to ensure information was safely reaching its final destination.

Because the point of the reorganization was to cut down on costs, finding a new, potentially costly solution for monitoring the network was going to be a tough sell to management. DeFreese would need to find an inexpensive option; luckily for him, it turned out 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 had purchased some hardware through Plixer that included an early iteration of the company’s powerful Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow 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 got Scrutinizer, we didn’t really have our tentacles in the network yet,” mentioned DeFreese. “Streamlining came over the next five years, and Scrutinizer just never made it off the shelf. But now was the time for the solution to shine.”

When Scrutinizer had been implemented, DeFreese says he was impressed at the level of visibility the program gave him into the network. “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. Mercy Hospital was paying huge bills monthly for a transparent LAN service (TLS). When DeFreese undertook analysis with Scrutinizer, collecting data from different protocols and connection peers, the detailed reports Scrutinizer returned revealed an incredible truth. “We were paying for a gigabyte TLS connection, but the reality was that we weren’t even using 50 megabytes. By adjusting our subscription, we came to save between $80,000 and $100,000 a year.”

DeFreese points to another early example of Scrutinizer’s usefulness. It turned out that a client in the local server that handled OR, surgery and like data was taking up nearly 20 percent of all communication to the data center. Gathering this information allowed DeFreese to adjust the traffic accordingly.

Some of the benefits the program has offered Mercy Hospital are more basic. “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 praises the Plixer support team, saying that they have gone above and beyond 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’re on site as quickly as possible to get the job done.”

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To learn more about Mercy Hospital, Portland, visit them online at www.mercyhospital.org.

For more information about Plixer International, Inc., visit them online at www.plixer.com or call 207.324.8805.