Digital and Intelligent Transformation: Insights from the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University

However, the path to a smart hospital is rife with challenges. At the front end, AI applications and high-definition imaging demands are growing exponentially. At the back end, issues persist with outdated storage architectures and fragmented management systems. In the middle are mounting O&M issues and resilience risks. These structural contradictions have left many hospitals struggling in their digital and intelligent transformation.

To handle these challenges, the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University (JNUH), also known as Guangzhou Overseas Chinese Hospital, is partnering with Huawei to deploy the Simplified All-Flash Data Center 2.0 solution. By systematically restructuring the medical digital and intelligent foundation, they aim to explore a smart hospital development path that balances performance, resilience, and overall costs.

Smart Hospitals: Visible Changes and Invisible Challenges

The reason why smart hospitals represent the future of healthcare is that they strive for the most essential aspirations of the industry: making diagnosis and treatment more efficient, and reducing patient wait times.

Zheng Xiaofei, President of the JNUH

Zheng Xiaofei, President of the JNUH, has a clear vision of smart hospitals. "For the JNUH, a smart hospital is by no means a simple informatization upgrade or the mere purchase of a few more smart devices. We envision it as the core engine and technological foundation for development. It solidifies our distinct identity as an overseas Chinese hospital, and enables our internationalization." Guided by this vision, the construction of a smart hospital is not just a technological project, but a strategic one.

This digital and intelligent transformation initiative has already begun to bear fruit at the JNUH.

On the clinical side, patient wait times have been significantly reduced with millisecond response for registration and billing. Doctors can now retrieve tens or hundreds of high-definition CT images in seconds instead of spending time waiting for loading wheels to stop spinning.

On the management side, core operations are safeguarded by high-availability architecture. Any single device failure triggers an automatic switchover, ensuring zero service disruption, zero data loss, and zero impact on the patient experience.

On the data operations side, the TCO for data storage has been slashed by nearly 40%. Unified visual management enables the IT department to pinpoint faults within minutes, eliminating the need for reactive troubleshooting.

These upgrades demonstrate the transformation of the smart hospital from an abstract concept to a reality of digitally-empowered clinical diagnosis and hospital operations.

However, these upgrades were only possible through a systemic infrastructure overhaul. Prior to this transformation, the constraints of the traditional data center architecture constantly hindered daily hospital operations. The challenges the JNUH had to overcome are the three major pain points shared by the entire industry:

The first pain point is system bottlenecks at critical moments. Even if the registration and billing processes run without a hitch, lagging and freezing during peak hours remain unavoidable when it comes to doctors reviewing medical images and issuing medical orders. In fact, the root cause of long queues outside consultation rooms is often tied to loading latency and freezing within the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and PACS imaging systems. The bottlenecks in high-concurrency processing are not isolated to individual departments. They are a problem of the entire traditional storage architecture.

The second pain point is the vulnerability of core systems. Medical data is the lifeblood of any hospital. In the past, if a core service system went offline due to hardware failure, the entire clinical workflow would be interrupted—a risk that is inherently difficult to eliminate under traditional architectures.

The third pain point is complex O&M. The heterogeneous stacking of equipment from multiple vendors forces IT departments into perpetual reactive loops. Compatibility issues take up all the time and resources, leaving none for higher-value innovation.

These are universal pain points across the healthcare industry. In the early stages of informatization, many hospitals procured storage equipment separately for different service systems, adding independent backup devices. This resulted in bloated architectures, complex management, and skyrocketing costs. As hospitals venture further on their journeys of digital and intelligent transformation, these historical debts are turning into major roadblocks.

A Simplified All-Flash Data Center, Transforming the Digital-Intelligent Foundation of Healthcare

These complex and systemic challenges cannot be resolved through piecemeal patching. The JNUH chose Huawei's Simplified All-Flash Data Center 2.0 solution to systematically upgrade its digital-intelligent medical foundation, resolving four major transformation issues: performance, cost, O&M, and resilience.

The overarching goal is to reconcile the seemingly contradictory objectives of performance and cost-effectiveness.

The all-flash architecture serves as the bedrock for performance upgrade of core services. The physical seek time of traditional HDDs presents a bottleneck for response latency, which the all-flash architecture resolves by reducing data read/write latency to the sub-milliseconds. This ensures the instant rendering of large-capacity image files and high-definition CT scans when doctors retrieve them, while also delivering a better experience for operations like registration and billing. That's where the value of data storage lies—enabling highly efficient clinical workflows and ensuring a seamless experience for every diagnosis and treatment.

However, conventional wisdom dictates that high-performance flash memory inevitably comes with high costs. The Huawei solution uses technological innovation to dispel this notion.

Traditionally, different service systems required separate procurement of storage hardware, along with independent backup devices to prevent logical errors. This proliferation of equipment not only inflated hardware costs but complicated O&M. Huawei's solution uses efficient data reduction technologies, utilizing a single unit of equipment to meet the multifaceted needs of storage, backup, and disaster recovery (DR). By converging previously fragmented resources into a unified resource pool, the solution slashes the TCO of data storage by nearly 40%. A unified visual management platform enables the IT department to pinpoint faults within minutes, eliminating the chaos caused by multi-vendor equipment.

Reliability is another advantage of this solution. In the past, data center resilience focused predominantly on warding off external attacks and performing data backups. Yet, the most dangerous threats sometimes come from within. The downtime of a single storage device could paralyze the entire outpatient system. In the JNUH, the Huawei solution provides a data-center-level active-active DR architecture. Any single device failure triggers an automatic failover, ensuring zero service disruption. Even if one data center suffers a site-wide failure, the system can swiftly complete the switchover to safeguard the hospital's service continuity.

Translating Implementations into Insights: Three Pillars of Digital-Intelligent Transformation

This actionable and replicable implementation path developed by the JNUH offers a clear smart hospital blueprint for medical institutions, with three key insights:

First, the conventional notion that high performance means high costs has been dispelled. A pervasive inclination in medical informatization has been to opt for conservative, incremental solutions constrained by near-term budgets. However, this often leads to frequent equipment replacement and skyrocketing hidden O&M costs, which result in higher overall costs in the long term.

"In the past, due to budget constraints, many of our peers leaned toward conservative choices when upgrading hardware," noted Zheng Xiaofei. "Our practice demonstrates that an advanced all-flash storage architecture, coupled with efficient data reduction technologies, not only boosts performance but significantly reduces operational costs across the board. It blazes a trail of accessibility that balances performance with cost-effectiveness."

Second, a streamlined and converged architecture can unlock the innovative potential of IT teams. Previously, the hospital IT department had to expend considerable resources on cross-vendor compatibility debugging, troubleshooting, and routine inspections, locking technical personnel into low-level, repetitive maintenance.

The success story of the JNUH demonstrates that a unified, converged infrastructure for integrated, visualized management of computing power, networks, and storage can free technicians from burdensome, reactive maintenance. This shift allows hospital personnel to redirect their expertise toward higher-value service innovations, such as AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment.

Third, proactive defense is a standard feature of next-generation infrastructure. Medical data and clinical research findings are a hospital's core assets, and they cannot tolerate any disruptions. Zheng Xiaofei said, "We strongly advise our peers to hardcode high-grade active-active DR and continuous data protection into data center baselines right from the early planning phases."

The JNUH's deployment of a simplified all-flash data center is more than a technical upgrade of its storage architecture. It is a paradigm shift in the development of digital and intelligent foundations for healthcare. This shift demonstrates that performance and cost-effectiveness can seamlessly co-exist in the digital and intelligent transformation of healthcare, as can resilience assurance and lightweight O&M. Cutting-edge digital technologies can be applied seamlessly to the hospital's long-term strategies for high-quality development, overseas Chinese hospital heritage, and comprehensive internationalization. These innovations offer a tangible and viable roadmap for the digital-intelligent transition of medical institutions.