Antelope Valley Hospital prepares for the future with comprehensive IT solutions

Steeped in the rich lore of high desert gold rushes and 20-mule-team borax adventures, Lancaster, Calif., has seen steady growth since the late 1800s. Today, with aeronautical and research firms, Edwards Air Force Base and nearby Los Angeles filling the region with commerce and people, there’s little letup in sight.


The 420-bed Antelope Valley Hospital (AVH), a facility of Antelope Valley Healthcare District, is the only full-service hospital in the area, offering comprehensive diagnostic imaging services, surgical and critical care units, an award-winning maternity facility, specialized cardiac care
and rehabilitation services. It has the second-busiest emergency department in Southern California, caring for more than 100,000 patients a year.

Like most hospitals with a 50-plus year history, AVH helped usher in the age of high-technology healthcare, welcoming waves of innovations with cautious enthusiasm. Eager to stay up to date and provide patients with the most advanced care possible, AVH pieced together an impressive array of IT equipment, software solutions, data center enhancements and enterprisewide systems.

As a result, AVH’s IT landscape was as rugged as the San Gabriel Mountains that cast shadows across this valley in the afternoon. Older, inefficient equipment, frequent outages, waning support and warranty agreements, costly license renewals and repairs dominated hospital leaders’ concerns. Time lost when critical systems faltered or failed and the knowledge that the quality of patient care was in the balance were never far from their minds.

One hundred seventy-eight servers filled the hospital’s data center wall-to-wall—each running one application. When a server malfunctioned due to age or disk failure, the business it supported suffered, creating a domino effect on other departments that depended on it.

"I was very frustrated with the existing hardware," said the hospital’s CIO,
Humberto Quintanar. "It was becoming old and unreliable. We also needed to improve our redundancy and enhance our ability to recover from server and storage failures."

Building a comprehensive solution
IBM’s approach appealed to the hospital’s executive and IT teams because it integrated a broad range of high-quality products and services, an unwavering focus on comprehensive solutions and an attractive finance package. "Other companies we talked with offered only partial solutions and we would have had to piece together components from various vendors. We knew we had to cover everything in the hospital environment," said Quintanar.

Creating a dynamic proving ground
"IBM came in and said, ‘We have this wonderful virtualization process,’" said Quintanar about IBM’s cross-platform server consolidation, automation and systems management solutions, which allow fewer physical servers to be
partitioned to run as multiple secure virtual servers.

"We said, ‘Let’s prove it!’ We implemented a little pilot—a small application that worked within an actual production environment. From that point on we knew that virtualization works, that it really does well, so IBM
drew out the plan, put together the whole set of solutions for us and helped find the financing," he said.

That plan grew from a tactical approach aimed at reducing costs into a long-running strategic partnership in which this small-town healthcare mainstay receives IBM large-enterprise consulting and world-class technology.

Immersing themselves in the hospital’s environment, the experienced IBM team tapped a roster of experts, including outside vendors, as needed.

"At some point, we had people here who were original participants in the development of the DS4800 and ESS800 ‘Shark’ technology, so they knew what was going on inside and out," said Quintanar.

Of the original 178 physical servers, 98 have been virtualized to date—with 22 IBM servers taking the place of 102 of the original boxes. That’s 98 the hospital will no longer have to pay licensing and maintenance for, said AVH IT manager Pawel Majer.

"We’re still going to have 178 servers, but we are not going to have to pay for support for the 98 virtual servers that are going to be running under VMware," he said. "With a single point of contact going through IBM, support is a lot easier. And instead of having 10 IT people qualified in different systems, we have two VMware specialists who can support all the servers."

Keeping control in the hospital’s hands
A server consolidation study by longtime IBM Business Partner Sirius emphasized that AVH could structure the new technology rollout in a way that gave managers choices in deployment—and would not tie them to IBM technology. Sirius also offered specific "if-then" scenarios to help hospital decision makers narrow their options, gave the hospital team a clear blueprint of how the new environment would function and provided for frequent onsite visits so they were not faced with an array of unknowns.

Further helping ease the installation was IBM Systems Director, a set of platform management tools that puts control of both physical and virtual resources in the hands of the hospital’s IT professionals. IBM Director also allowed AVH to manage both IBM and non-IBM products from a common dashboard that enables users to troubleshoot potential problems.

"Before, we were a reactive IT department," said Majer. "Now we are notified before anything even happens —before the users notice. About a week after Director was in play, we got a notice that one of our RAM modules was going bad on the Blade. We were able to get support online right away. They brought the part in, and before the system went down we replaced the part and the users never knew there was a problem."

Tapping into other hospital’s experiences
IBM Healthlink Solutions’ depth and breadth of clinical experience proved valuable as the hospital sought to make changes in its clinical and business operations. For example, in the process of reviewing AVH’s revenue cycles, alert onsite IBM Healthlink Solutions consultants noticed some misclassified charges that resulted in noticeable under-billing. The discrepancies were immediately corrected—thanks to the growing trust and strong relationship that is the keystone of this engagement.

IBM’s broad scope of experiences also saved time—and a lot of legwork, said Majer. With a portfolio of large, medium and small healthcare clients, the IBM team shared past successes—and lessons learned—with the AVH team.

"We would evaluate the IBM team’s experience in terms of what we were thinking of doing and take the better route," he said. "You can only do so much research yourself. With a large partner like IBM, they can steer you toward proven solutions. They gave us the references, and we would just call them up and verify—and it was always correct."

Financing the investment
The IBM team was attuned to this busy not-for-profit facility’s financial constraints and opened doors to funding the multimillion-dollar expenditure.

"I knew IBM offered financing, but I didn’t know they could offer such a low market rate—typically lower than the rate we could get on savings accounts," said CIO Quintanar. "IBM made it very easy for us to acquire the equipment through their financing and low-rate leases."

"We got the DS4800 for very low cost and created a redundancy with the Shark. We expect to see an ROI in two years," he added. IBM and Sirius also extended incentives, with annual credits that could, for instance, help AVH fund items that were not budgeted the previous year.

Indeed, progress in the Valley continues. Migration of VMware, replacement of the remainder of old servers and completion of UPS and generator upgrades are still in the works, but hospital teams declare their IBM
experience a success.

"IBM has been really good for us," said Quintanar. "Rather than just a vendor, they’ve been a true partner that understands our business and our struggles, and understands that sometimes we just need some help. To them it’s not always a matter
of money."

About IBM
IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences brings real-life business and IT solutions to healthcare providers of all sizes. IBM is a proven leader in data integration, supercomputing, high performance storage and information technology services. With more than 3,200 professionals and eight research labs around the world, IBM is uniquely equipped to drive innovation and efficiency in hospitals and healthcare organizations.

For more information
To learn more about products and services available from Sirius Computer Solutions, visit the Sirius Web site at www.siriuscom.com <http://www.siriuscom.com> .