A 3x More-Responsive HIS Provides Improved Health Care Experiences

Background

Founded in 1866, Wuhan Union Hospital is one of the top 10 tertiary hospitals affiliated with Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. It treats more than 5 million outpatient visits annually and has led the industry in heart transplant surgeries throughout the country for five consecutive years. The hospital reaches advanced levels in terms of cardiopulmonary transplants, conjoined twin separation, bone marrow transplants, megacolon resection, and cell therapy.

Challenges

An Unresponsive HIS Undermined the Health Care Experience

Hospital Information Systems (HISs) host mission-critical services like registration, pricing, billing, and dispensing medicine. HISs help manage personnel, equipment, and financial conditions. Therefore, HISs are closely related to patient diagnosis. Any mistakes may undermine doctor-patient relationships.

In order to ensure quick treatment, Wuhan Union Hospital opened both on-site and online registration channels, which allows the hospital to treat more than 15,000 outpatients per day. However, during service peak time (usually from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.) many departments complained about the unresponsive HIS, and each request took more than 30 seconds, incurring patient dissatisfaction. Paramount diagnosis and treatment information needs to be imported into the backup system — and backing up 50 gigabytes of data usually takes hours, which increases IT department workloads, and affects IT efficiency.

Solution

HIS Upgrades — Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Active-Active Storage Solution

Huawei proposed its OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage with active-active solution to address the hospital’s slow HIS responses. OceanStor Dorado works with the hospital’s existing architecture, databases, medical software, and O&M modes on the live network. It provides millisecond-level failover when a device is faulty to ensure key service continuity and health care data security.

First, Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage offers the industry’s highest performance and replaces the hospital’s legacy EMC VNX storage. This accelerates read and write I/Os of the HIS in an end-to-end manner, avoids service interruption during peak hours, and improves health care experiences. In addition, Huawei’s HyperMetro gateway-free active-active solution replaces the hospital’s legacy VNX storage solution that has a VPLEX gateway. Two OceanStor Dorado systems implement mutual mirroring. Data can be synchronized between the two systems in real time and failed over in milliseconds in the event of a device fault, which helps ensure always-on critical services.

Deployment networking of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage with active-active solution

Benefits

Benefit 1: 3x Faster HIS Leads to Better Health Care Experiences

The hospital’s average registration time shortened from 3 seconds to half a second during peak hours, reducing patient wait times and improving the health care environment. The solution also shortened the average HIS response times to a service request in diagnosis, billing, and pharmacy departments from 30 seconds to a mere 3 seconds, ensuring smooth HIS operation. Data backup improved. Backup time for diagnosis and treatment data reduced from 60 minutes to 20 minutes, improving O&M and increasing productivity.

Deployment networking of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage with active-active solution

Benefit 2: The Gateway-Free Active-Active Solution Ensures Stability for Critical Workloads

Huawei’s gateway-free HyperMetro solution supports load-balanced active-active mirroring and non-disruptive cross-site takeover, ensuring a zero RPO and a close-to-zero RTO. The gateway-free design reduces the number of faulty nodes, simplifying networking and management. The active-active layout can be smoothly upgraded to a geo-redundant one and to a converged data management solution without using additional gateway devices. This solution provides solution-level availability at 99.9999 percent plus fast and stable mission-critical workloads to ensure system breakdown has no effect on core applications.

Benefit 3: Smooth Data Migration Accelerates Data Center Transformation

Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage provides effortless data migration services. Transferring data to Dorado does not affect production services when using Huawei’s heterogeneous virtualization migration solution. Huawei’s solution migrates 50 terabytes of core transaction data to a new IT system in only four hours during non-business time, and completes the entire migration within one week. Huawei’s all-flash storage solution ensures online, non-disruptive migration, which on-site test employees are unaware of. The HIS runs stably after the Dorado hosts new services. Subsequently, Wuhan Union Hospital’s smooth health care experiences are highly praised by patients and their relatives.