There is no question that today’s healthcare system is going digital. With new mandates addressing the use of electronic health records and the growth of digital tools and solutions to assist in care delivery, the entire healthcare system increasingly relies on the delivery of digital services. For an industry that has traditionally relied on pen and paper records, this transition places particular stress on small and rural hospitals who don’t have large IT teams or budgets to address these challenges. This was precisely the situation that created a unique set of challenges for our team here at Gordon Memorial Health Services (GMHS), that includes Gordon Memorial Hospital, Clinics and a Long-term Care Facility, which we were able to address by going the converged infrastructure route.
Our hospital, located in Gordon, Nebraska, is the only hospital in a 50 mile radius. We serve 10,000 people across 10,000 square miles and are proud to be one of the top 100 Critical Access Hospitals – meaning we are one of the best hospitals providing a safety net for communities across rural America. As with many rural hospitals, we were dealing with an aging IT infrastructure that required a great deal of upkeep and considering what we wanted to accomplish in the future, we knew our infrastructure needed a major update. We just didn’t have the flexibility to make the digital transition with the resources we had.
As we looked into our options for an infrastructure refresh, we did an intensive ten-year total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. The results surprised us – we had been told that converged infrastructure would save us money in the long-term, but we weren’t expecting the magnitude of the savings. By deploying a Vblock System from VCE, we expect to save an estimated $695,000 over a decade for services, support, hardware and staffing. For a hospital of our size, this is business-changing. We can put the savings towards new technologies to help improve patient outcomes, instead of using it on maintenance to keep the hospital systems up and running. It allows us to put our focus on what matters: our patients.
The Vblock System enables us to support a new, mission-critical electronic health records (EHR) solution which allows our healthcare professionals to securely access and exchange patient records in real-time, leading to better decision-making and better patient outcomes.
The capacity of the Vblock System also gives us room to grow. We aren’t completely utilizing its full capacity so we can use it as a revenue-generating platform by providing many different cloud-based solutions to other medical institutions in the area. Again, this goes a long way to helping improve care across the region, keeping the focus on our community and our patients.
As industries like healthcare change with the introduction of digital technologies, the smaller players (like GMHS) will feel the pinch. Converged infrastructures offered us a way to address this transformation head on and meet the challenges of the industry by having an infrastructure that is prepared to handle it.
If you’d like to learn more about Gordon Memorial Health Services’ deployment, check out the case study. For more information on how a VCE solution can help your healthcare organization, please visit us at http://www.gordonmemorial.org/