With the adoption of hyper-converged solutions and the search for the right cloud strategy on the rise in IT organizations, we are always looking for customer insights as we continue to develop technology to best serve them. Healthcare is a uniquely demanding field for IT professionals, as delivering fast, secure, and seamless care to patients is critical. Recently, I was able to visit with customer Joel Taylor, SVP and CIO of CarePoint Health about the IT challenges of combining three hospitals and 55 clinics into one new healthcare organization.
TV: Thanks for talking with me today, Joel. To start us off, could you give us some background information on CarePoint Health and what your role is there?
JT: Happy to be here. Yes, CarePoint Health was formed in 2012 when it brought together three existing hospitals in Hudson County, New Jersey. By uniting these three hospitals and now 55 medical clinics, our patients are able to benefit from a broad spectrum of expertise and capabilities. We leverage a network of top doctors, nurses and other medical professionals who concentrate on putting patient care front and center.
As the CIO of CarePoint Health, my job is to enable our healthcare providers through the seamless use of technology.
TV: From an IT perspective, can you tell me what it’s like to bring three hospitals together into one organization?
JT: It has already been quite the project and we still have another year to go. In the beginning there were three hospitals running three different IT shops, and we had the challenge of trying to collapse all of that together. There was some fairly old infrastructure in place, some of which hadn’t been upgraded in ten or more years. Since then, we’ve been working to make the technology at all three hospitals and 55 clinics work together so that no matter where a patient is being treated, their medical staff can provide them with the best possible care.
We started by implementing Dell XC Web-Scale Converged Appliances, powered by Nutanix, as we felt that it was important to provide our medical staff with a highly-available, reliable storage solution. The XC appliances helped us reduce the complexity of three tier architectures. The reduced complexityhas meant that our IT generalists are able to keep our storage up and running without hiring additional storage specialists.
We’ve also chosen to go with a private cloud powered by Dell MSite with MEDITECH, Dell Cloud Clinical Care Archive, Dell Networking and Dell KACE. Our decision to consolidate technology and go with one provider made the job easier as all of the technology works well together. Also, it has allowed us to control OpEx costs and get the most out of every dollar we spend.
TV: That’s great. What were some of the goals that you were trying to achieve when you started on this project, and where are you at with those goals today?
JT: Going into this project, our primary goal was to provide our medical professionals with ‘invisible IT’ that enabled them to care for patients without IT challenges. We knew we needed 24/7 business continuity so that healthcare staff and providers had fast and reliable access to electronic medical records, billing data and other important information. The XC appliances have helped us to achieve just that.
Other goals included a reliable disaster recovery plan and enabling room for growth. We’re still in the process of finalizing all of this implementation, but we’re confident that the solutions we’ve chosen will allow us to scale up as the business requires in the future.
TV: If you met someone else who was beginning a similar project, what advice would you give them?
JT: My advice would be to choose an IT provider who is looking out for you. All of our Dell contacts – from our account team to Dell Financial Services – have been consistently looking out for our best interest. That has made a huge difference as we know we can trust their advice and expertise.
