Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Customer Interview: Medical Industry

With the continuous improvement of medical reform policies and the continuous development and iteration of new technologies, information technology has been widely used in health care, greatly changing the mode of medical treatment and improving the medical environment. The new system of benefiting people to seek medical treatment, which "lets legs run less and network run more," has also been launched continuously in recent years, making it no longer difficult to "see a doctor." Not only that, medical informatization has gradually run through the whole process of medical health field, but also brings multiple benefits to hospitals to improve operation efficiency, service quality, user satisfaction and core competitiveness.

The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University (hereinafter referred to as "the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University"), as a large-scale comprehensive third-class hospital integrating medical treatment, teaching and scientific research, has become one of the benchmark hospitals for informatization construction in medical industry by virtue of years of informatization practice and exploration.

However, in order to carry the new systems that are continuously launched and meet the business demands that have increased exponentially, the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University is also facing many new challenges, such as insufficient room space, limited rapid deployment of new systems, increased operation and maintenance pressure, etc. Deficiencies in traditional IT infrastructure continue to emerge, making it imperative for hospital IT departments to find new ways to fundamentally solve problems. After considering and evaluating various solutions and vendors, the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University finally selected SmartX hyper-convergence as the new architecture choice to accelerate the transformation and upgrading of hospital IT infrastructure.

video interview

The following is our video interview with Li Wenzhen, Director of Information Department of Guangzhou Third Hospital, and the in-depth interview manuscript of the media. Director Li Wenzhen objectively described the actual difficulties encountered by the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University in upgrading IT infrastructure, thinking and understanding of hyper-converged architecture, selection evaluation and final decision-making process.

Hospital traditional IT architecture faces many pain points in the new era

It is understood that the informatization construction of the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University started early, and in 2008, the outpatient and inpatient electronic medical records of the whole hospital were launched. In 2016, the hospital formulated the "13th Five-Year Plan" informatization plan, hoping to improve the existing application system from the top-level design and establish an information integration platform and clinical data center according to the requirements of step-by-step implementation. With internal control indicators as the starting point, on the basis of meeting the requirements of various management indicators stipulated by national policies, a standardized operation service system of the whole hospital was established with the help of informatization.

Driven by the two-wheel drive of policy and business demand, the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University has also put forward new specific tasks for its informatization construction. On the one hand, according to the requirements of "Internet + medical health," we will continue to improve the "Rouji Network Hospital" built as early as 2016. At the same time, it should also meet the information requirements of various indicators of performance appraisal in public hospitals. In addition, the hospital also plans to pass the electronic medical record system application level five-level evaluation. In terms of smart hospital construction, it is planned to reach the third level of hospital intelligent service evaluation. In terms of DRG technical specifications for medical insurance, data standardization construction shall be carried out through clinical data center to improve the data quality of the whole hospital.

In Li Wenzhen's view, a series of new tasks put forward new requirements for the IT infrastructure of the hospital. In particular, it is necessary to meet the continuous innovation of various hospital business systems and applications, which puts forward new architectural requirements for stability, scalability and maintenance management. For the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, if we continue to use the IT infrastructure mode of "traditional server + storage," we can no longer adapt to the new changes.

"A big pain point in the existence of traditional physical servers is the large space pressure in the computer room. At present, our hospital computer room is only over 100 square meters. According to the traditional way, at least 200 servers should be deployed. Li Wenzhen said that at present, the computer room of the hospital is very saturated, and the cost of traditional architecture storage equipment is also too high, facing greater challenges from the perspective of computer room cost and physical space. Another big pain point is the rapid deployment of business systems, especially the continued increase in compute and storage resource requirements. If we continue to adopt the traditional server architecture, when we receive urgent superior tasks or department requirements, we cannot achieve rapid online of related systems or applications.

At the same time, traditional architectures also suffer from single point failures. The IT infrastructure under the original virtualization environment adopts blade servers, which are all shared backplanes. If the backplane fails, all VMs will be interrupted, and the security risks are prominent. In addition, as hospital business systems and clinical applications become more and more abundant, various types of storage and server equipment are also increasing, especially in the case of limited operation and maintenance personnel in hospital information department, the pressure of hospital IT management operation and maintenance is increasing.

"There are only 13 people in the Information Department of our hospital, and only one person is responsible for daily operation and maintenance. The operation and maintenance pressure of more than 60 large and small systems and more than 200 servers in the hospital is very high. "Li Wenzhen said that for the hospital information department, it is still hoped that the IT architecture will be as simple as possible, and it is best to achieve rapid deployment and expansion of business systems and maintain stable operation of business systems without increasing the operation and maintenance workload.

Why Hyperconverged as IT Infrastructure

"In view of the lack of room space, rapid system deployment, operation and maintenance pressure and other needs, we also want to try some new technologies to solve the problem. At that time, we came into contact with super-convergence technology. "Li Wenzhen said that since the super-fusion technology is still relatively new to hospitals, there are still some concerns about the reliability of super-fusion at the beginning of contact, but after detailed testing and demonstration, the concerns are completely dispelled.

In Li Wenzhen's view, hyper-convergence has many advantages over traditional architecture. One of the most intuitive values is that it is very suitable for the rapid launch of new businesses. At the same time, the hyper-convergence architecture is simple, which is conducive to IT operation and maintenance and business expansion. There is no risk of single point failure, which is also well guaranteed in terms of reliability. Li Wenzhen admitted that the hospital finally chose hyper-convergence as the new architecture deployment, the most important thing is to consider the inevitable upgrading needs in the future. "For example, when hardware upgrades are carried out five years later, if it is still a traditional architecture server, the workload of migrating databases, systems, etc. is very large. However, these problems do not exist with hyperfusion technology, because hyperfusion is multi-node and does not require complex system and database migration work. You can complete the migration action by making a jump directly at the node. This is what we are most concerned about when considering hyperfusion technology. "

According to introduction, after defining the adoption of hyper-convergence technology as the new IT infrastructure of the hospital, the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University made a selection comparison, and made great efforts in POC (proof of concept) test and internal demonstration, and finally selected the domestic brand SmartX as the cooperative manufacturer.

"In fact, after we chose hyper-convergence technology, we started with a trial and demonstration with an international first-tier manufacturer. Later contact with SmartX, after comparison found that they are cost-effective, or based on domestic technology source code independent controllable, are more in line with the evaluation indicators, and then after our internal demonstration, finally choose to cooperate with SmartX. "Li Wenzhen said, on the one hand, SmartX product technology level and international first-tier manufacturers match, as a completely independently developed domestic brand, SmartX ultra-convergence platform source code independent control, reliability has a great guarantee; and the underlying hardware requirements are not picky, has a very good openness, which greatly reduces the construction cost of IT infrastructure, easy to deal with hardware changes. On the other hand, the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University attaches more importance to the advantages of SmartX's local original service. In case of problems, it can directly communicate with SmartX's product R & D engineers.

At present, the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University has adopted SmartX Halo 8100S super-converged all-in-one machine to build infrastructure in our hospital area, and has deployed more than 100 virtual machines. At present, the business systems and applications such as electronic medical records, PACS system, hospital sense, physical examination and medical records have been migrated and deployed to SmartX super-converged platform. Especially since 2019, according to the policy requirements and its own development needs, the hospital has launched more than 20 applications on SmartX super-convergence platform for six consecutive years, with good use effect. "After using SmartX hyper-convergence platform, in addition to saving room space and energy consumption costs and facilitating daily maintenance, what we feel most is that we can realize rapid deployment of system applications, with strong reliability and scalability. "Li Wenzhen, for example, said that the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University recently received the task of provincial medical insurance platform, requiring that the implementation and deployment of the whole project must be completed within one month. "After receiving the task, we actually completed the deployment of the entire server architecture in only one day on the SmartX hyperconverged platform, saving a lot of time for the entire project. "

"Hyperconvergence" adapts to future IT infrastructure needs of hospitals

In fact, for hospitals, the challenge of deploying hyperconverged architecture is mainly in terms of reliability, and many hospitals have previously held a wait-and-see attitude towards this new technology. For example, in terms of business continuity and reliability, the industry's most concerned focus is whether the hyper-converged architecture can meet the high reliability requirements of hospital critical services. In this regard, Li Wenzhen also expressed his views and suggestions.

"In fact, super-convergence technology is very mature at present and has many applications in finance, manufacturing and other fields. Some hospitals may hesitate to migrate core applications to hyperconverged architectures. From the fact that we have been using the hyperconverged platform for more than a year, we feel that this technology is still very reliable, and we also plan to migrate more core systems to the hyperconverged platform. "Li Wenzhen said that since the launch of SmartX super-fusion platform in April 2018, the operation of the super-fusion platform of the hospital has remained stable for more than a year. The reason why it can run stably is that the source code autonomous control technology of SmartX super fusion platform is very important, so it can communicate in time when encountering problems and quickly obtain original technical support.

In Li Wenzhen's view, the hyper-convergence architecture is very suitable for the ever-changing hospital business scenario requirements driven by the current and future medical reform policies, especially in the rapid deployment and stable operation of the business system. "For example, receive a more urgent task. In fact, virtual machines can quickly set up the required server environment. In addition, super convergence also has a great promotion effect in saving computer room space and computer room energy consumption cost. "

So, for hospitals, what is the difference between hyperconverged architecture and normal virtualization deployment? Li Wenzhen believes that traditional virtualization architecture is more complex and costly to deploy. "If you build a virtual server under a traditional architecture, you need to buy a high-performance server first, and then deploy virtualization software and connected storage to build a virtualized environment. Hyperfusion technology is a completely integrated platform that can be used directly. "

In terms of hospital IT infrastructure, Guangzhou Medical Third Hospital plans to further cooperate with SmartX in the future. According to Li Wenzhen, 5 nodes have been deployed in the hospital area of the Third Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, and it is planned to expand and deploy 6 nodes again, which will reach 11 nodes at that time. The core business production systems and applications such as HIS and LIS will also be migrated and deployed to the super-convergence platform for six times. In addition, the hospital plans to fully deploy and implement hyper-converged infrastructure in the newly built Women and Children's Hospital Affiliated to Guangzhou Medical University in 2021.

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