Weathering Hurricanes and COVID-19, Halifax Health Ensures Care Continuity with Pure Storage Technology

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Jan 26, 2021, 09:00 ET

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Jan. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, today announced that Halifax Health, a community-based hospital system in Florida, chose Pure to optimize clinical workflows and to deliver high availability of mission-critical applications − including its MEDITECH electronic health record (EHR) system. This will enable its staff to ensure care continuity and better optimize patient outcomes.

Setting the Stage for Greater Business Continuity

A trailblazer, Halifax Health, which provides a continuum of healthcare services through a network of organizations with facilities including a tertiary hospital, two community hospitals, a cancer treatment center with five outreach locations, the area's largest hospice and a center for inpatient rehabilitation, was the first healthcare organization to cluster MEDITECH using Windows failover clustering. Halifax Health became the driving force behind MEDITECH's current high availability solution, which is now installed in over half of MEDITECH organizations. Clustering not only ensured greater availability of the MEDITECH EHR system and other apps, but also improved Halifax Health's disaster recovery and rapid restore capabilities in the face of natural disasters and prepared the IT team to launch new apps quickly amid COVID-19.

The Need for Improved Resiliency and Reduced Complexity

Even with these measures in place, Halifax Health faced a trio of challenges – availability, performance and security of mission-critical systems, while doing so cost-effectively. In addition, due to its location in Florida, Halifax Health must be able to stay up and running during tropical storms and hurricanes. Medical staff need immediate access to clinical apps and health information whenever they need it, and rely on IT to do so.

To meet these challenges, Halifax Health wanted to create multiple instances of its MEDITECH environment. However, this required an additional, significant investment in the existing approach, with additional legacy storage, networking and compute – all of which required more licensing to make everything work. Halifax Health took the opportunity to revisit its entire infrastructure and selected Pure Storage FlashArray™ as the foundation for its MEDITECH instances, allowing it to cluster storage with three arrays with the resources for one -- cost-effectively and seamlessly.

"We were the first hospital to cluster our MEDITECH environment, so we were blazing new trails. Our investment in Pure allows us to retain full control of our infrastructure, without running up operating expenses," said Mike Marques, Halifax Health's Vice President and Chief Information Officer of IT. "We've had nothing but 100 percent uptime ever since. Pure is going to play an important role in our MEDITECH architecture as we move forward. And the best part about that is that we can do it without a lot of additional infrastructure and complexity."

Visible Impact and COVID-19 Connection

Today, more than 200 applications, including all of Halifax Health's tier 1 applications, such as PACS, TeleTracking and several EMRs, run on Pure. Halifax Health has reduced its recovery objectives and recovery time objectives significantly by moving to Pure. While its infrastructure has grown, Halifax Health's IT team can manage the same infrastructure with the same, if not fewer resources.

Halifax Health also has cut the time spent managing storage by 75 percent, which proved especially valuable early in the pandemic when the hospital system needed to develop in-house telemedicine and virtual waiting room applications rapidly. The IT team was able to redeploy staff to implement the telehealth platform in three days – a high-impact transformation in a very short time.

"Halifax Health is an amazing example of how healthcare organizations can transform the role of IT, enabling resiliency and agility and supporting the innovation necessary to care for their patients. By retiring legacy infrastructure and making a strategic investment in a modern data platform from Pure, the team was able to remove years of technical debt that made Halifax Health's environment complex and, more importantly, they were able to give clinicians and patients an optimized clinical experience," said Josh Gluck, Vice President of Global Healthcare Technology Strategy, Pure Storage. "Storage reliability, resilience, cost-control, security, performance and operational simplicity aren't just non-negotiables; they're game-changers for providers, especially those under pressure to innovate and adapt to new challenges as they improve patient outcomes."

With high-performing, resilient and easy-to-manage storage, Halifax Health can accelerate its core applications with fewer resources, delivering the best patient care today and well into the future. Pure's simplicity enables Halifax Health IT team members to focus on optimizing and enhancing IT, instead of spending time managing storage. For example, the virtual disk expansion process is 10x faster, which is easier on staff and reduces the opportunity for mistakes. The organization can cross-train engineers and increase staffing efficiencies, while minimizing any technology-related frustrations. Pure allows IT resources to be redeployed in the organization to ensure patients and clinicians are receiving the highest level of care possible.

To learn more about how Halifax Health helps staff optimize patient outcomes through technology, read the case study.

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) gives technologists their time back. Pure delivers a modern data experience that empowers organizations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. One of the fastest-growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure helps customers put data to use while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.

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