OCHIN XtremIO iCDM redefines the software development lifecycle of critical Epic environments

OCHIN
XtremIO iCDM redefines the software development
lifecycle of critical Epic environments
ESSENTIALS
HEALTHCARE QUALITY AND EFFICIENCY FOR
AMBULATORY PROVIDERS
Industry
Healthcare
Healthcare is all about improving patient experience, enhancing population health,
Organization Size
and controlling costs. That takes a significant technology investment many nonprofit
250 employees (7,200 concurrent
users)
healthcare systems and charitable clinics simply can't afford. OCHIN, a nationwide
Business Challenge
•
•
Non-production downtime
decreasing workforce
OCHIN helps "safety net" providers deliver efficient, first-class ambulatory care to
productivity
underserved populations. But OCHIN's IT demands are not small. The company
Volume of patient visits
growing 20 percent and data
growing at 40 percent annually
•
health information network, focuses on closing the gap.
Customer growth requires a
responsive, scalable
handles four million ambulatory patient visits annually. OCHIN’s aggressive expansion
strategy, adding new member organization every month, could add one million new
patients this year alone. And with visits growing 20 percent, and data volumes
growing 40 percent yearly, OCHIN demands every ounce of performance and
efficacies from its Epic Ambulatory Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solution.
architecture
Results
•
•
One of the main challenges was that OCHIN needed additional copies of EPIC’s Caché
Reduced non-production
database to satisfy EPIC best practices and handle new requirements for Meaningful
downtime from 6.5 hours to 17
Use and ICD-10 medical classifications. Creating these copies required hours of non-
minutes
production downtime in OCHIN's traditional storage environment, which hampered
Recovered workforce
production SLAs, development projects, code testing, and member training.
productivity losses with savings
of $40,000 per EPIC Caché
copy
•
Improved performance from
6,000 to 25,000 IOPS and
established linear scale out
capability
•
Shrunk data center footprint
ENVIRONMENT
After considering numerous options, OCHIN moved EPIC Caché from its legacy hybrid
flash storage to EMC® XtremIO™ all-flash storage. OCHIN deployed two XtremIO XBricks to run multiple Epic Caché database environments. These include seven full
copies of the production Caché database used for quality assurance testing, internal
application development, release staging for new application code, and additional
projects. XtremIO also runs nine data-masked copies of Caché for member training.
from two full racks to a portion
of one rack for 75 percent
OPEX reduction
•
3.9:1 data reduction (13.1:1
overall efficiency).
Solutions
•
EMC XtremIO
•
Epic Ambulatory EMR, Microsoft
EMC VNX® supports OCHIN's Epic Clarity reporting database, Microsoft SQL Server,
and Caradigm enterprise data warehouse. For data protection, OCHIN backs up
XtremIO and VNX to EMC Data Domain® deduplication aware backup systems, which
are replicated to another data domain at a remote facility 800 miles away.
SQL Server, Caradigm CIP
CUSTOMER PROFILE
DOWNTIME REDUCTIONS EQUATE TO PRODUCTIVITY GAINS
With XtremIO, OCHIN virtually eliminated downtime during Caché copy processes.
Traditional hybrid flash storage required 6.5 hours of downtime to create a full copy of
Caché, while XtremIO requires almost no downtime and accomplishes the task in only
17 minutes and can now be fulfilled on-demand.
OCHIN has calculated that each hour of non-production downtime cost $6,300 in lost
productivity for developers and site specialists. Because every copy on XtremIO has
on-par performance as the production volume, and by virtually eliminating downtime
for database copies, XtremIO saves the company nearly $40,000 per created copy.
OCHIN anticipates a return on the XtremIO investment of 12 months.
"XtremIO improved workforce productivity tremendously,” says Paul Matthews,
OCHIN's chief technology officer. “In minutes, we can have a full Caché environment
online, be ready to apply the latest ICD-10 or Epic code, and start testing. That’s
speeding up our development and release cycles so we can provide members with the
latest, compliant-ready EMR capabilities faster.”
XtremIO integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) enables OCHIN to create more
copies, all high-preforming, to more quickly accelerate development and release
cycles, while saving nearly $40,000 in lost productivity per copy. The company
refreshes its Release database every 60 days, so in this one environment, OCHIN has
eliminated nearly one-quarter of a million dollars in lost productivity (6 x $40K =
$240K/year savings).
Plus, space-efficient XtremIO Virtual Copies (XVC) and a 3.9:1 data reduction ratio
dramatically reduced data center space, power, and cooling usage. XtremIO's iCDM
and XVC technologies have allowed OCHIN to grow the number of Caché database
copies from five to seven full production copies and from one to nine data-masked
copies.
“OCHIN now has the agility to stay ahead of EPIC best practices, and to future-proof
the environment for any changes in regulations that may drive new data
requirements,” adds Matthews.
"XtremIO improved workforce productivity tremendously. In
minutes, we can have a full Caché environment online, be ready
to apply the latest ICD-10 or Epic code, and start testing."
Paul Matthews, Chief Technology Officer, OCHIN
SAVING SPACE AND MONEY
Thanks to XtremIO’s space-efficient virtual copies (XVC) and a 3.9:1 data reduction
ratio, XtremIO saves OCHIN an enormous amount of storage space. "We have 37
terabytes of production and non-production copies and I'm only using seven terabytes
of actual physical disk on XtremIO," reports Matthews.
"We went from two 48-unit racks to a portion of one 48-unit rack,” he adds. The
reduction in power and cooling costs represent a 75-percent OPEX savings.
SPEEDIER DELIVERY OF MEMBER TRAINING
Since the move to XtremIO, OCHIN also delivers training environments quicker. In the
past, creating a database copy, masking protected health information and refreshing
the clean copy of a training environment took upwards of 18 hours, compared to two
hours now. (The disk time required is less than one second. The process of creating a
new training environment – data wipe, shrink, migrate and bring back on line – is
what takes the two hours.)
In addition, members often waited six months for their training databases. Today,
OCHIN refreshes training environments on-demand when needed, in some cases
refresh are performed daily. "We can provide members with a training environment
that's much closer to everything they'd experience in the full production EPIC
environment," notes Matthews.
He attributes other productivity gains to the faster refresh cycles for OCHIN’s training
environment as well. His team no longer needs to apply upgrade patches before new
training instances move into production. Overall, XtremIO has helped redefine how
training is offered: more robustly and in real time.
IMPROVED PERFORMANCE TO HANDLE MORE PATIENTS
EPIC Caché performance soared from 6,000 previously to 25,000 IOPS on the current
two XtremIO X-Brick system. One benefit of this is that it eliminates a bottleneck that
had affected performance, enabling OCHIN to handle several million annual patient
visits today.
The IOPS improvement also allowed for a 400-percent increase in growth over the
previous solution. And when that threshold is reached, the company can easily scale
out storage linearly as patient volume grows.
"We anticipate patient visits to increase nearly 100 percent over the next three
years,” Matthews says. “I can just add XtremIO X-Bricks to grow more efficiently than
was ever possible on traditional storage."
CUT REPORTING TIME IN HALF
OCHIN also accelerated reporting with XtremIO. For example, running Meaningful Use
Company Overview
reports from the Caché shadow database on traditional storage took almost seven
OCHIN is one of the largest and most
hours. Those same reports now complete in just over three hours on XtremIO.
successful health information
networks in the U.S., hosting more
than 70 healthcare provider
Similarly, OCHIN shaved a full hour off of moving data from the Caché shadow to the
members across 19 states. OCHIN's
Epic Clarity database for reporting on operational metrics such as patient volume and
IT solutions improve the integration
payer mix.
and delivery of healthcare services
across a wide variety of practices,
with an emphasis on safety net
STRIVING FOR EVEN MORE EFFICIENCY
clinics and small practices, as well as
critical-access and rural hospitals.
Looking ahead, Matthews anticipates adopting more iCDM capabilities as well as
automating more functionality from the XtremIO operating environment, which will
further streamline copy provisioning and automate database refreshes and
provisioning.
Matthews concludes, "XtremIO is so fast now we don't expect a big performance jump
in the new version, but it reduces complexity with features like XtremIO virtual copies
to provide on-demand writeable copies. That added efficiency is always important
when you’re serving healthcare providers with limited budgets.”
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