Munson Healthcare Transforms Patient Care with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass., Sept. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Munson Healthcare, a 391-bed regional healthcare system comprised of eight hospitals and five clinical centers in northern Michigan, has implemented EMC® technologies to transform its IT infrastructure and deliver new IT services. Munson has created a Health Information Exchange (HIE), enabling healthcare providers to facilitate a high level of patient care through a secure information exchange. With a private cloud, enabled by EMC and VMware® technologies, Munson Healthcare has significantly increased availability of mission-critical medical applications, enabling improved patient care delivery, and reduced costs.

Customer Benefits:

• Streamlined Administration—Tight integration between EMC VPLEX^®, EMC VNX^® and VMware has enabled Munson to reduce IT administration time and free resources to focus on more business-critical projects.
• Improved Availability of Medical Applications—With IT resources shared across data centers, Munson Healthcare has increased availability of mission-critical applications including their EMR, HIS, and PACS by 75%, enabling clinicians to deliver higher-quality, more consistent patient care.
• Reduced Capex and Opex Costs—Munson Healthcare has achieved a 60% cost reduction by avoiding the need to invest in physical equipment and additional IT staff.
• Enabled Business Growth—Munson Healthcare has created an HIE enabling the hospital to offer new IT services to area hospitals and 45 physician practices with online access to electronic medical records (EMR) and other clinical solutions.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Due to space constraints, Munson Healthcare decided to split its data center between its main hospital and a second facility nearby. Munson Healthcare needed to replicate its virtualized VMware infrastructure between both sites to ensure high availability of critical applications needed for 24 x 7 patient care delivery.

The healthcare provider's IT organization also needed increased reliability and agility to expand its role as a provider of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) offerings, such as hosting an HIE and providing EMR capabilities  to a growing number of hospitals, physician practices and laboratories inside and outside the provider's network.

After evaluating IBM and EMC solutions, Munson Healthcare selected EMC VPLEX Metro virtual storage to achieve both high availability and shared access of resources across both its sites. Munson Healthcare replaced its HP SAN Virtualization Services Platform with EMC VPLEX while replacing its HP EVA 8100's with EMC VNX unified storage.  It has virtualized its IT infrastructure using VMware vSphere™ server virtualization and Citrix XenApp application virtualization. Embracing a FLASH 1^st strategy, Munson Healthcare leverages EMC's FAST™ Suite to increase the reliability of its mission-critical applications. 

Munson Healthcare's ITaaS offerings include MEDITECH EMR applications, NextGen and eClinicalWorks electronic practice management, and McKesson hospital information system (HIS). The healthcare provider's private cloud also supports Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server applications, Cerner, and Siemens syngo Dynamics picture archiving and communication system (PACS).

Customer Quotes:

Scott Dingman, Senior Systems Engineer, Munson Healthcare

"In the last four years, we have added 45 physician practices consisting of 184 physicians to our HIE, and more doctors are coming to us daily. With ITaaS enabled by VPLEX, we can provide the services physicians need in a very timely manner and with minimal downtime. This brings the relationship between their offices and our hospitals closer, which leads to increased business referrals."

"EMC offered a detailed roadmap and vision for enabling storage virtualization and ITaaS.  EMC has enabled us to expand and enable more physicians to deliver quality patient care."

"ITaaS helps physician offices reduce their costs because they don't have to invest in equipment and IT staff. Instead, they can rely on and simply log into the EMR or practice management system without concern for where the IT resources are located."

"We selected VNX for its tight integration with VMware and ability to help us on our virtualization journey.  It was a natural fit to put an EMC product behind VPLEX.  With VNX and the FAST Suite, our IT environment is able to scale and transform as our business continues to grow."

Jeff Dyer, Technical Strategist, Munson Healthcare

"Since deploying VPLEX, we've increased availability of our mission-critical applications by 75%. VPLEX Metro really lives up to what EMC said it could do."

"IT is no longer a budget drain for us. We've achieved a 60% cost reduction by avoiding the need to invest in physical equipment and additional IT staff. We're also generating revenue with our ITaaS offerings and letting the clinicians concentrate on medicine. We're adding true value to the business."

"Today, IT can't simply throw technology into a data center and expect physicians and nurses to embrace it. We now have business analysts in our IT organization who work with the caregivers to understand their clinical requirements. It's essential to first make process changes and align IT with the business. That's been the key to the transformational impact we've made."

Additional Resources:

• Customer Video: Munson Healthcare
• Customer Profile: Munson Healthcare
• Learn more about EMC VPLEX and EMC VNX
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, FAST, VPLEX and VNX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation