AppAssure Software Protects Sensitive Patient Information for SEUC’s GE Healthcare Centricity System
Challenge: Zero RTO
Solution: Virtualization and restore snapshots down to 5 minutes
Results: SEUC has a seamless “hot ready.” If there’s a problem, they flip a switch and there’s very little downtime
For over 40 years, Southeastern Urological Center, P.A. in Tallahassee, FL., has been a unique facility designed to give patients the most comprehensive urological health services. Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Barry Jalbert is a key player in making sure the network systems that support these services are healthy themselves.
“I’ve just hired another staff person here in the IT department, but for the last 2.5 years, it was just me.” Jalbert takes care of the primary facility and three remote offices – including a research center, a surgery center, and a clinic –120 users, and about 19 servers (including a virtual server). “I do anything and everything related to the network: phones, advertising, the websites, doctors’ blackberries, backup and recovery, education, creating power points, you name it.”
GE Centricity: Cutting Edge of Healthcare Technology
SEUC stands on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to healthcare by using GE Healthcare Solutions for staff, patients, and procedures. “We have two websites, one of which is a patient portal where patients can get lab results, communicate with their doctors with secure messaging, set appointments, and so on,” notes Jalbert. “All of our medical and management recording is done electronically on the GE Healthcare system, so if a server goes down, everything basically stops.” If there’s a server failure at SEUC, all medical procedures come to a standstill:
- staff can’t look at records
- doctors aren’t able to look at a patient’s past history in order to make diagnoses
- surgeries can’t be scheduled
“If something goes down in the system and the medical staff has to do things by hand, then at some point they have to go back in and enter all the information which takes a lot of time,” acknowledges Jalbert. “In the healthcare industry, having our equipment working constantly and steadily is vital part of our work – with little or no downtime.”
Before AppAssure, Jalbert had big concerns about how they were doing backup in the traditional method – on tape, and then every week taking it to the bank and depositing in a safe deposit box. “I didn’t have a good feeling about it all – whether it really was being backed up. I didn’t get the feeling all the data was saved,” explains Jalbert, who started to look around for another solution.
Jalbert did an AppAssure demo and said, “If this software does what it says it does, we’ll be in great shape!” And indeed, in AppAssure, Jalbert realized he’d found the features he’d been looking for:
- A test environment where he doesn’t have to put his whole database on the line – “I’ve been doing Hyper-V tests and it’s great”
- The ability to replicate off site
- Virtualization: “I’ve got a hot ready. It’s seamless. If there’s a problem, I flip a switch. There’s short downtime and doctors can go back to work.”
- Restores snapshots down to 5 minutes. Currently Jalbert is doing 15 minute interval snapshots, but before it was just a once-a-day backup
Right now Jalbert has just had to recover a few items, so no huge catastrophes – knock on wood. He’s doing a lot of testing and noticing a lot of little features of AppAssure that makes it “really sweet” as he says. “I’ve been slipstreaming drivers right into the VM. It’s nice and working perfectly even though it took some trial and error with the VM because of the dissimilar hardware. Still, with tape you don’t even have this option unless you build a whole infrastructure.”
At the beginning AppAssure sounded too good to be true, but Jalbert’s absolutely convinced that he’s made the right decision for his backup and disaster recovery solution. He’s so convinced, in fact, that after doing an information session at his local GE Healthcare Solutions group (Centricity Technical Users of Information Technology), he was encouraged to present at the Annual Conference in 2010 – which he did in January. “I believe in this product. I feel more confident about all my systems, and AppAssure’s tech support has been great!”
About Southeastern Urological Center
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For over 40 years, Southeastern Urological Center, P.A. in Tallahassee, FL., has been a unique facility designed to give patients the most comprehensive urological health services. SEUC stands on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to healthcare by using GE Healthcare Solutions for staff, patients, and procedures. SEUC has two websites, one of which is a patient portal where patients can procure lab results, communicate with their doctors with secure messaging, set appointments, and more. All of SEUC’s medical and management recording is electronically maintained on the GE Healthcare system.
