The following is a guest article by Christian Aboujaoude, CTO at Keck School of Medicine of USC.
Sticking to a simple principle in IT is anything but easy. It’s only natural for IT people to focus on the purpose of a technology — such as making operations more efficient. Meanwhile, new software solutions flood the market every year. This makes it challenging to stay on top of what is relevant and useful and what will help unlock future innovation.
As many healthcare IT professionals know, it takes longer in our industry versus others to apply new technology due to the impact and changes to the broader environment that it requires. But the healthcare industry is not as far behind from a technology standpoint as people think anymore. In fact, there are existing technologies that many healthcare organizations have in play – like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) – can be leveraged in different ways to take your innovation and modernization further. But it requires that healthcare IT professionals develop an appropriate HCI strategy that will enable the organization to modernize its infrastructure and unlock added value beyond what was originally intended.
Here are some of the key considerations healthcare IT professionals should make when setting these HCI strategies and the benefits they can achieve through a modernized IT infrastructure.
How Creating a HCI Roadmap Unlocks the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud
HCI is underpinned by many of the same distributed systems technologies as public clouds, enabling IT organizations to modernize existing infrastructure and bring the benefits of cloud computing into organizations’ datacenters, while allowing for the control and security that is paramount for healthcare.
HCI solutions can also enable the extension of private clouds into public clouds to create a true hybrid cloud infrastructure. By leveraging a hybrid cloud infrastructure, applications can be deployed and managed with the same tools and procedures, while making it easy to migrate data and services across clouds.
However, during its implementation most IT teams are focused on the wrong aspect of HCI. They are concentrating on the purpose of HCI, virtualizing hardware operations, instead of the human impact HCI can have. That’s where a plan or roadmap that navigates the twists and turns of software-based architecture can come in to play. By designing a HCI roadmap for shifting workloads back and forth from cloud to on-prem, it can help shift IT’s focus from purpose to people.
How HCI Enables More Flexibility for Healthcare
While HCI and cloud tools can require a substantial mindset shift for IT teams who have devoted their careers to infrastructure technology stacks, the benefits of HCI in the healthcare world far outweigh the cons. By implementing HCI there’s no longer a need to bring in technicians to install hardware and connect cables. Virtualized hardware can be spun up and down in a few minutes, which rapidly accelerates software development timelines while access to hypervisor software makes it easy to manage these environments without ever powering up a rack of servers. In addition to the technical pros just outlined, there are also people pros to implementing HCI.
As a major medical provider and center, Keck School of Medicine of USC (University of Southern California) has four hospitals, more than 40 clinics across five Southern California counties and treats more than 15 million patients. Our technology environment supports clinicians, patients, administrators, and everybody else who makes modern healthcare possible in our hospital system, so it’s imperative that the technology runs as smoothly as possible. To ensure this and set us up for success we work with hybrid multicloud solution providers like Nutanix to help us create and execute a roadmap for working across multiple clouds which ultimately enable us to provide better healthcare services.
HCI and cloud services like those we leverage from Nutanix give us the freedom to build an elastic cloud presence that can adjust to both SaaS applications and traditional, on-prem operations. As the environments got easier to manage, our IT team was able to spend more time solving human problems instead of worrying about daily technical issues. This not only helps the people who use Keck School of Medicine’s technology every day but also propels our efforts to help humans stay healthy.
Conclusion
The platforms organizations implement today have an impact on what their future platforms might look like. Leveraging HCI to modernize IT infrastructure will only become more important for healthcare organizations as the pace of innovation quickens. HCI platforms give IT teams the ability to scale and tie into other functionalities from cloud services to move operations into the background and ultimately push technology to its limits.
The demand for robust HCI solutions that adapt to healthcare organizations’ needs is apparent. A healthcare organization that has its data together, organized and understood in a modern data platform can help build a better future. This is no longer just “nice to have;” it’s critical for any healthcare organization’s long-term success.
By creating a HCI roadmap, IT environments can have lighter workloads and greater simplicity. This simplicity gives teams the time to focus on providing the most advanced, most supportive and the most connected care possible to patients. The mission is simply, to take care of those who need help. Everything needs to support that mission and nothing else.
