The Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University Powers Smart Healthcare with a Solid Data Storage Foundation

Today, the hospital is exploring the infinite possibilities of smart healthcare with the spirit of continual innovation. With China's first smart ward powered by Huawei's all-in-one smart home solution and the comprehensive upgrade of the medical data storage foundation, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University is writing a new chapter in which healthcare and digital intelligence complement each other.

A Century-old Hospital's Data Anxiety: From Surging Services to Storage Bottlenecks

The Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University has grown into a grade-A tertiary general hospital with more than 3,300 medical staff and 2,000 beds. It sees 2 million emergency visits and 100,000 surgeries each year.

The huge service volume creates extremely high demands for the hospital's IT system. Underlying data storage must deliver robust capabilities to handle the demanding requirements of widespread EMR adoption and surging imaging data.

Intelligent transformation in healthcare is a complex project. It requires real-time and uninterrupted transmission and sharing of diverse types of medical data. For example, during peak hours, loading delays in the picture archiving and communication system (PACS) can hinder diagnosis efficiency. A storage system failure can interrupt access to EMRs, potentially affecting the timely treatment of patients in critical care. Data volumes are poised to surge even further with the upcoming launch of the Taishang campus and the continued expansion of the hospital's operations. Conventional storage architecture is insufficient for meeting these needs.

The hospital's IT team understood that the key to intelligent transformation is efficient data flow, and the storage system is the highway for this flow. That's why the hospital made upgrading its storage the first step of its digital and intelligent transformation strategy. It undertook three initiatives: improving performance to ensure service system stability during peak hours, enhancing reliability to implement seamless failover and ensure medical service continuity, and simplifying O&M to streamline management and improve response speed.

As such, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University chose a path of innovation. It implemented an all-flash transformation of its data centers to address service pain points with technological breakthroughs.

Breaking Bottlenecks with All-Flash Transformation: An Upgrade in Performance, Reliability, and O&M

The transition to all-flash data centers goes far beyond a simple hardware upgrade. It is a fundamental reimagining of infrastructure architecture and O&M. The Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University worked with Huawei to achieve a data foundation transformation in three key dimensions:

The first is high performance. In the traditional FC/IP network architecture, data access latency is high, especially during peak hours, when the system response speed becomes a bottleneck for diagnosis and treatment. To address this, the hospital upgraded its storage network to the NVMe over Fabrics (NoF)+ architecture, reducing latency to 0.05 ms through 100 Gbit/s RDMA high-speed channels. This change reduced the report generation time of the laboratory information system (LIS) from tens of milliseconds to less than 1 ms. Doctors can now access images and EMRs without waiting, which significantly improves diagnosis and treatment efficiency.

The second dimension is high reliability. In the past, the hospital used an active-passive architecture in which the passive site was idle most of the time, and failover took more than 30 minutes. The new active-active architecture uses Huawei's HyperMetro technology to implement real-time data dual-write. In the event of a site failure, services fail over instantaneously with zero disruption. This solution not only guarantees uninterrupted services year-round, but paves the way for a multi-active architecture across three campuses.

The final dimension is easy O&M. O&M efficiency is also crucial to smart healthcare. Huawei's DME intelligent management platform enables visualized management and control of storage systems. The platform proactively monitors device health to deliver early risk warnings. During incidents, it pinpoints root causes to reduce recovery time from hours to mere minutes. In one case of abnormal system latency, DME pinned the issue down to network link jitter within minutes and auto-generated a fix, significantly reducing O&M pressure.

This transformation was designed with future-proofing in mind. The new architecture supports seamless upgrade to a 3DC solution, which leaves ample headroom for the upcoming Taishang campus. This all-flash upgrade has modernized the hospital's storage infrastructure to enable smart healthcare.

Storage as the Foundation: Envisioning the Future Blueprint of Smart Healthcare

This all-flash data center transformation serves as a masterclass in systemic design and strategic vision for the healthcare sector. Three key takeaways stand out:

The philosophy of storage as the foundation holds valuable lessons for the entire industry. In healthcare IT modernization, organizations often prioritize upper-layer applications while overlooking critically important underlying storage architecture. The success story of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University shows that the carrying capacity of a hospital's information system hinges on a storage system built for high performance, high reliability, and easy O&M. This storage system not only resolves immediate performance bottlenecks but also ensures the infrastructure can effortlessly accommodate data growth over the next 5 to 10 years with a scale-out design.

Choosing the right technology partner is important. For smart ward deployment, Huawei's all-in-one smart home solution introduced a new caregiving paradigm that elevates the patient experience at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University. For data center modernization, Huawei's cutting-edge technologies and industry expertise enabled the hospital to upgrade its storage foundation, resolving long-standing performance and reliability issues.

The digital and intelligent transformation of healthcare is a continuous, evolving journey with no fixed template or final point. Throughout its transformation, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University has consistently maintained an unyielding passion for innovation.

Looking ahead, the hospital has a clear roadmap. To continually deepening its digital and intelligent transformation, the hospital plans to upgrade its current active-active data centers into a multi-DC, multi-active architecture once the new campus is completed. This will establish a more multifaceted disaster recovery (DR) framework that will further strengthen the reliability of the hospital's service systems.

At the same time, the hospital will strengthen ransomware protection to ensure end-to-end resilience. Every patient's personal data will be strictly protected. The hospital will work with Huawei to develop a medical data intelligent analysis platform that will use continually evolving Large Language Model (LLM) technologies to unlock the value of healthcare data. This will transform clinical decision-making, scientific research and innovation, and refined management and inject momentum into smart healthcare.

On the journey toward smarter healthcare, the hospital and Huawei are bridging technological capabilities with real-world healthcare needs, turning innovative ideas into practical outcomes. This partnership unlocks boundless potential at the intersection of a century of medical excellence and state-of-the-art digital intelligence.