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Steward Health Care System treats more than 1 million patients each year through its network of hospitals and physician network.
We recently published a case study highlighting how Boston-based Steward Health Care System uses ExtraHop to run their IT operations more intelligently. Think your IT environment is complex? Try delivering more than 200 applications to 11 regional hospitals and over 100 clinics. Application performance in healthcare is critical, especially for the electronic medical records (EMR) applications that doctors and other caregivers rely on when treating patients.
"When a task that should take seconds takes minutes, the department workflow gets disrupted—and many tasks on the nursing floor are repeated, so those delays can literally add up to hours over a long shift," explains Adam Hanson, Senior Director of Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Engineering for Steward Health Care.
With ExtraHop, Steward Health Care has achieved some impressive results:
- Correlated visibility across the entire delivery chain – Steward Health Care runs some very complex applications, including the latest version of MEDITECH delivered over Citrix XenApp. When a physician logs into that application, dozens of systems are involved in the process. Says Hanson, "That single mouse-click involves calls to multiple data sources, across the 30-or-so fileservers that hold code for the application, and then reassembling and presenting it through Citrix XenApp. None of our other monitoring tools enabled us to correlate those inter-server communications and especially Citrix delivery—and that's the type of stuff we're using ExtraHop to really understand."
- Proactive problem resolution – ExtraHop continuously analyzes L2-L7 communications between systems, building performance baselines so that Steward Health Care knows when trends begin deviating from normal. This way, they can address issues before they impact users.
- Deployment in minutes – Steward Health Care was able to deploy ExtraHop and start seeing valuable data almost immediately. That was a big win especially compared with the set up process required for traditional IT management products.
