1. Effective Systems
Management for Healthcare
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2. Application-Aware Systems Management
» Application-aware systems management is a major challenge
for healthcare institutions, such as hospitals, specialty care
centers, and doctors’ offices
» High-dollar medical devices, such as MRI, CT, or digital X-ray
machines rely on operation of the institution’s medical
applications, servers, network, storage resources on which
they depend
Healthcare IT Environments need a pragmatic monitoring
and management solution that is easy to
deploy, operate, and manage.
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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3. Healthcare Specific Challenges
HIPAA Compliance
Storage and Data Warehousing
Desktop Virtualization and Mobile Devices
Healthcare Applications
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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4. HIPAA Compliance
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» The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA)
Act has proposed a set of highly complex requirements
regarding privacy and overall systems, data, and facilities
security
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Access control and protection of patient data
Controlling physical access to systems and facilities
Protecting information processing and maintenance
Data protection during network transmission
Activity log review of all systems containing patient information
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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5. HIPAA Compliance
»
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health
(HITECH) Act requires healthcare organizations to ensure HIPAA
compliant conduct of their business associates
»
It also obligates the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to
conduct regular audits increasing regulatory burden for healthcare,
resulting in a more demanding set of systems management requirements
 Data protection and security: Privacy-relevant systems involved in handling patient data,
firewalls, antivirus, intrusion detection, and OS
 Centralized data control and protection: enables HIPAA auditing is needed for generating
compliance reports
 Proactive enforcement of antivirus, encryption, and firewall policies: key for data
security and ensures optimal application health
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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6. Storage & Data Warehousing
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»
MRI, digital X-ray, and CT imaging requires tremendous storage
requirements
»
These digital copies must be archived in accordance with government
healthcare regulations, including HIPAA
»
With images, electronic health records, hospital communications, and
other administrative files have to be managed and archived in a
compliant manner
»
In order to improve healthcare, data warehousing plays a big role as
medical staff access and correlate patient data from different sources
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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7. Storage and Data Warehousing
»
To prevent or troubleshoot issues, healthcare organizations need the
visibility from application down to the spindle and everything in between
»
This ensures efficient storage management and guarantees performance
and reliability of storage hardware
»
Another major challenge is the lack of visibility on the impact of an
application on LUNs and disks
 Storage admins don’t know the storage performance degradation or downtime of a
specific spindle, array, or LUN
 Once they know this, they can then plan for provisioning, tiering, and capacity planning
for storage effectively
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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8. Desktop Virtualization and Mobile Devices
»
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To offer patients better care, medical and administrative staff require
mobile access to patient data at specific locations and particular points in
time
 Mobile device support require a back-end infrastructure that is resilient, secure, and
well performing
 Security break or system outage results in medical staff being a lot less productive or
patient confidentially being compromised
»
For rapid resolution, IT admins need to
 Identify the host cluster for each virtual desktop
 Have one dashboard which shows virtual machine properties, health, critical metrics,
status of physical hosts servers, and capacity and performance of the underlying storage
arrays
»
Having this visibility enables effective management of virtual desktop
infrastructure and mobile device access
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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9. Desktop Virtualization and Mobile Devices
»
Proactive security management for endpoints is key
 Prevent confidential patient data from being disclosed
 Prevent malware from spreading within the walls of the hospital
»
With systems management, healthcare institutions can
 Monitor events that are created by antivirus, firewalls, or intrusion detection system
 Respond to these events in a proactive manner that goes beyond simply alerting IT
operations staff
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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10. Healthcare Applications
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»
Healthcare applications – custom and off-the-shelf – are critical for
patient care and flawless billing
»
To ensure reliability and flexibility of systems monitoring and
management, an agentless approach is key for
 Auto-discovery of new resources
 Configuration changes
 Relying on public cloud services
»
An application-centric approach to traditional server, storage, network,
and virtualization management enables IT admins to conduct daily
management tasks, troubleshooting, and capacity management with the
overall hospital requirements in mind
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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11. Conclusion
»
Detecting issues with a purely systems-centric approach is difficult
 It’s reactive
 Time consuming
• Takes hours or even days to detect and diagnose issues
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Healthcare institutions require a systems management approach
 Keep an eye on the application
 Advanced analytics to correlate application performance and reliability issues with
incidents at the systems
• Hardware
• Virtualization
• Security layer
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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12. The Systems Management Approach
»
This whitepaper from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
addresses IT challenges to healthcare organizations and emphasizes
having an application-centric systems management approach
Download this whitepaper and learn
how to proactively implement
effective systems management
EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT FOR HEALTHCARE
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13. Thank you!
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