• Customer

      Treant Care Group and Ommelander Hospital Groningen

    • Industry

      Healthcare

    • Offerings

      EMC VNX unified hybrid storage arrays, EMC XtremIO all-flash scale-out enterprise storage arrays

    • Key Challenges

      Mergers and ongoing collaboration gave two hospital groups the opportunity to provide healthcare professionals with even better services

    • Outcomes

      Improved continuity, reliability and availability. An optimal IT service for clinicians that helps them deliver the best levels of care

  • Challenges

    The shifting healthcare landscape

    The face of healthcare is changing right across Europe. As people are living longer, they require more care to maintain happy, healthy, independent lifestyles. This care no longer has to be delivered from hospitals and doctors’ surgeries alone, and traditional care delivery models are evolving to reflect this. At the same time, the way healthcare is funded is also changing. Governments and insurers are looking to move away from disconnected, reactive treatment models towards predictive, preventative models. This has meant a fundamental reorganization of underlying infrastructures.

    The Treant Care Group (Treant) in the Netherlands was formed when three hospitals in the north of the country merged while the Ommelander Hospital Groningen (OHG) is the product of a merger between two hospitals in the same region. They share an IT that team provides services to five hospital sites and 20 care locations. The group is unique in that it offers both cure and care services, and that it can optimize service by acting at a regional level.

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  • Our Approach

    Hybrid cloud, software-defined data center

    The mergers presented an opportunity for the groups to modernize and rationalize its IT, moving it from an infrastructure-based solution to an application-centric solution. ICT manager Erik Venema and his team researched the market thoroughly to find a storage provider to support this. Having looked at the performance, reliability and availability of EMC solutions at similar organizations, and after considering their own experiences, they decided once again on an EMC solution, delivered via valued EMC partner Visolity. Venema says, “We have been working successfully with EMC and Visolity for over ten years.”

    Ommelander Hospital Groningen and Treant worked to deploy a unified, virtualized server infrastructure for all sites based on VMware, and a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for more than 6,000 staff. The care groups’ mission-critical workloads include a hospital information system based on the Nexus portfolio, each with an Oracle database; office automation applications; an internal application for managing the group’s medication processes; and Sectra for its radiology imaging. The environment is almost completely virtualized with VMware vSphere, and runs on EMC VNX unified hybrid storage arrays. Venema says: “We also use XtremIO for our VDI environment to deliver the right performance to more than 3,000 users across five hospital sites and 20 care locations.”

    This replaced a disparate collection of virtual and physical environments across the two merger organizations, supporting a range of clinical, administrative and office applications.

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    • “In a constantly moving industry we have to be able to steer change while providing the best possible service to our users to benefit patient care. We’ve been partnering with EMC and Visolity for more than ten years now, and during this period we’ve worked well together to meet our goals.”

      Erik Venema, ICT Manager, Treant Care Group and Ommelander Hospital Groningen

  • Outcomes

    Unbeatable end-user experience

    Performance is vital for healthcare professionals. A specialist has limited time to see each patient, and each one has a virtual desktop experience that’s fast and reliable, enabling them to use the time with their patients efficiently.

    Virtualization creates more possibilities

    Treant and OHG can roll out the VDI solution over many locations and users with just one image. XtremIO easily handles the load of 3,000 users sharing a single image. This standardization has reduced the administrative burden on the IT team. Fewer data centers mean a smaller investment and reduced energy costs for Treant and OHG.

    The board loves it when a plan comes together

    Venema says: “We’re very pleased that such a complex project was completed in time and on budget. This success has been made possible partly by a good collaboration with medical staff and the board of directors.”