Data-driven medicine

Located in a fast-growing region of the Netherlands, Flevohospital has seen the population of its city more than double since it opened its doors in 1991—and that growth trajectory is expected to continue in the next decades.

That rate of patient population growth—along with advancements in medical technology such as CT scanners and MRI—means exponential increase in the scale and velocity of data that Flevoziekenhuis must manage in order to deliver high-quality patient care. And on top of organic data growth from new patients, the hospital must also contend with government healthcare regulations that require increasing amounts of data to be gathered, retained, and shared.

When Lex Pater, ICT manager for Flevoziekenhuis, started at the hospital, he immediately knew he needed an IT partner to help manage the data growth and control costs—the hospital’s aging storage environment simply wasn’t built with the intelligence and speed required to deliver healthcare in an increasingly connected and regulated world.

Strategy as a service

While exploring vendors in their search for a technology partner, Pater and his team started a conversation with Hewlett Packard Enterprise that changed their perspective. “HPE took us seriously, and we really started to build that relationship,” Pater explains. “From the beginning, the discussion was not product-based, it was more like they wanted to find out how they could help us meet our modernization and support challenge.”

Strategic relationship drives hospital innovationFlevoziekenhuis builds a data platform of the future with HPE 3PAR and HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity

ObjectiveModernize storage environment to meet ever-increasing data scale, velocity, and complexity

ApproachLeverage HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity to make the move to an intelligent storage environment while avoiding capital investments

IT matters• Helps meet government mandate for

data sharing without costly upgrades

• Delivers PACS image archive security, eliminating reliance on third-party software or backups

• Accommodates infrastructure needs and staff support in a single relationship

Business matters• Saves 30% OPEX over previous storage

architecture with new pay-per-use agreement

• Modernizes entire infrastructure without adding staff or increased administration

• Delivers a model for growth without up-front investment or negotiation

Case study

Page 2Case study Flevoziekenhuis

Industry Healthcare

Out of those discussions came a creative intelligent storage solution based on HPE 3PAR to help Flevoziekenhuis modernize its data strategy. “HPE and Flevoziekenhuis entered into a pay-per-use storage agreement billed per gigabyte per month,” Pater recalls. “It was exactly what we needed to bring our IT capabilities up to speed. And so we became the first hospital in the Netherlands to sign a flexible capacity agreement for technology, now including backup and restore responsibilities and broadened to servers as well.”

The HPE 3PAR solution, billed monthly as a service for actual usage, allowed Pater and team to replace its previous storage environment and replicate it on spinning disk, while providing a flash environment for newer and frequently accessed data.

“Our as-a-service experience with HPE gave us the flexibility to plan for what we really needed,” Pater says. “It meant we could incorporate our actual storage needs into our annual budget instead of reacting to peaks every three-to-five years.”

Creative partnership underpins innovation

When a new set of regulations requiring healthcare entities to begin moving to a common data model for patient records to enable easier sharing of patient data between hospitals, labs, and researchers was announced in 2018, the team at Flevoziekenhuis faced a new challenge.

“What it meant for us is that we either had to buy a new EMR, or we needed to be able to quickly and securely place that data in a staging area—a data platform—for the purpose of sharing with the outside world and research,” Pater explains. “And this is a feature not built into most current electronic medical record (EMR) software suites. It means we have to make the move to a data platform of the future.”

To build a data exchange warehouse that would satisfy the future common data model, Pater and team decided to migrate their Cerner-based EMR system from SAP® MaxDB to SAP HANA®-based technologies, which support the data portability the hospital needs.

“We rely on HPE as a trusted business partner. For the past decade, they’ve helped us stay ahead of the curve by supporting our data and infrastructure strategy, and together, we’ll navigate whatever challenges the future brings.” – Lex Pater, ICT manager at Flevoziekenhuis

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Flexible to the core

According to Eddy van der Heijde, head of automation at Flevoziekenhuis, initiating the process was as simple as asking HPE for resources. “We presented our server requirements to HPE for SAP HANA, and they provided the capacity—it was that simple,” van der Heijde explains. “Because we already have a contract for a pay-per-use model, we did not have to negotiate.”

HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA takes the guesswork and expense out of designing and implementing a SAP HANA environment for Flevoziekenhuis. And because it’s configured and delivered on HPE ProLiant Servers, and managed by HPE Datacenter Care experts via Operational Support Services from HPE Pointnext, it frees up Pater and van der Heijde to focus on the hospital’s strategic initiatives and internal needs. “HPE has the knowledge and skills to deal with infrastructural issues quickly and effectively—this enables us to focus entirely on the day-to-day operations of the hospital,” Pater explains.

The SAP HANA migration had the side benefit of saving Flevoziekenhuis on its monthly bill with HPE. “With the addition of the compute resources, it pushed our contract into a higher use tier with HPE so now we’re getting more compute resources and more storage, but paying much less per gigabyte and unit of compute,” van der Heijde says.

And by incorporating Veeam Backup & Replication licenses through HPE, the team at Flevoziekenhuis is realizing further benefits in its server environment. “Our earlier backup solution required an agent on every virtual server, which was both time consuming and prone to faults,” van der Heijde recalls. “With the new Veeam solution, our backup is simplified because it backs up the entire VM pool. And because it allows storage snapshots, Veeam puts a substantially lighter load on our server resources.”

Locking down the image archive

With its EMR solution in place, Flevoziekenhuis still needed to address the sharing of medical imagery with outside hospitals and researchers. This element of the hospital’s strategy involves the sharing of pictures, MRI scans, radiology images, and x-rays.

Pater and team wanted to move to a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) that delivered the flexibility to meet European security and sharing requirements while reducing the complexity of backing up the massive archive.

To meet the challenge, Flevoziekenhuis chose to move its archive to a new HPE 3PAR array with HPE 3PAR File Persona software to deliver no-compromise block, file, and object access and protection. The software’s File Lock feature allows Flevoziekenhuis to protect critical imaging data from accidental deletion or alteration for specific or indefinite amounts of time.

Case study Flevoziekenhuis

Industry Healthcare

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“With HPE 3PAR File Persona, our image archive makes sure these files are not able to be changed anymore,” Pater explains. “This is huge for us, because it not only means nobody can accidentally change or delete our PACS files, but it means backing up our image archive is much less critical.”

Because Flevoziekenhuis maintains on-site and off-site arrays for disaster recovery, the archive is protected via File Persona without relying on time-consuming backups. “You have backups in order to recover files when they are accidentally deleted or modified,” Pater says. “We no longer have that problem because we have File Persona preventing that.”

According to van der Heijde, the old backup process was less reliable. “By using File Persona, we’re reducing the complexity of our environment.”

A team as a monthly expense

As the city and population continue to grow, Flevoziekenhuis will continue to scale to meet their needs, whatever that challenge entails. “We really don’t know what we might need in the next few years—whether it’s a scale issue driven by population growth, a technological advance that requires new infrastructure, or a new set of government regulations,” Pater explains. “But whatever comes our way, we know we can meet the challenge because HPE is part of our team.

“We will continue to outsource expertise, because a hospital our size can’t afford to have a staff of people with those specialized skills,” Pater sums up. “We rely on HPE as a trusted business partner. For the past decade, they’ve helped us stay ahead of the curve by supporting our data and infrastructure strategy, and together, we’ll navigate whatever challenges the future brings.”

Learn more athpe.com/3par

Customer at a glanceData storage environment delivered as a service via HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity and managed with HPE Operations Support System

Hardware• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8440

all-flash arrays

• HPE StoreOnce Backup

• HPE ProLiant blade servers

Software• HPE 3PAR File Persona Software

• Veeam Backup & Replication

• SAP HANA

HPE Pointnext• HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA

• HPE Datacenter Care (Operational Support Services)

© Copyright 2019 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

SAP and SAP HANA are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and in several other countries. All other third-party marks are property of their respective owners.

a00069490ENW, May 2019

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Case study Flevoziekenhuis

Industry Healthcare

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