Optim Healthcare Monitors the Health of Its Entire IT Service

Optim Healthcare maintains excellent patient loyalty and quality of car with Whatsup Gold.

Optim Healthcare, based in Savannah, Georgia, was founded in 1976. Serving southeastern Georgia, the facility’s mission is to provide their patients with the ‘highest quality care in surgical, hospital, clinical, diagnostic and therapeutic services with convenience, cooperation, efficiency and cost effectiveness in a comfortable and pleasant environment.’

Optim Healthcare is comprised of three hospitals and various medical practices specializing in Orthopedics: Foot and Ankle, General Orthopedics, Hand, Wrist and Elbow, Neck and Spine, Pediatric Orthopedics, Sports Medicine, Total Joint, Interventional Pain Management, and Urgent Care.

As an active member of Ipswitch’s WUGspace IT Community, Matt Cline, Senior Systems Administrator at Optim Healthcare offered to be a WhatsUp Gold and WhatsUp Application Performance Monitor beta customer. He was particularly interested in the universal dashboard offered in WhatsUp Gold, and the interactive application dashboard offered with Application Performance Monitor.

Proactively Fix Problems – Right Away

Without any training, Matt was able to set-up WhatsUp Gold in less than one hour. The dashboard was intuitive, easy-to-use, and provided him with current and historical performance information on his network, servers, and applications in extensive detail. By just clicking on an application, server, database, etc. on the dashboard, Matt is able to ‘drill down’ to deeper levels to find the root cause of performance issues. While he found the prebuilt dashboard to be useful as a starting point, he discovered that the dashboard is easily customized. Comments Matt, “The unified dashboard is the best interface I’ve used and is definitely the de facto future of service, server and application monitoring. I get a single view at a highly granular level and am getting the data I need to proactively fix problems and eliminate downtime. I love it!”

Matt developed a phased approach for implementation of WhatsUp Gold and highly recommends that every IT department have a deployment plan in place. He identified what applications he wanted to monitor in the initial phase, developed the profiles and started using some of the community profiles and out-of-the- box profiles that Ipswitch provides. Very quickly, Matt developed and implemented new profiles for Microsoft Active Directory, SQL Server, the facility’s picture archiving and communication system (PACs), GE Interface and several of the organizations electronic medical records applications, including SRS and Allscripts electronic health records (EHR).

When he was testing Ipswitch’s IIS profile on a production server, he discovered three to four deficiencies right away; issues that he wasn’t previously aware of including slowness in the database. Likewise, when he implemented a Microsoft SQL profile, he immediately discovered there was a critical performance issue. He immediately fixed the problem and eliminated possible downtime.

Maintain Excellent Patient Loyalty and Quality of Care

Optim Healthcare’s IT team of seven supports 1,400 internal users, including administrative personnel, clinicians, and countless current and perspective patients. If current patients can’t access the website to pay bills or if perspective patients can’t access the website to obtain information about the facility, physicians and services, this can impact patient satisfaction and loyalty. Over time, 24/7 website access will become even more important as Optim Healthcare expands website and social media services.

Optim Healthcare’s EHR systems are critical to the clinical operations of the organization. If these systems fail, there is a potential impact on the quality of patient care; clinicians must revert back to a paper medical record. When the EHR system comes back up, they then have to reconcile the paper record with the EHR – a time consuming task prone to errors. “Getting proactive alerts on performance issues with our patient care systems is a critical component in maintaining high quality of care standards,” comments Matt. The next major phase of WhatsUp Gold and Application Performance Monitor at Optim Healthcare will focus on monitoring the McKesson Practice Management and EHR system.

As an active member of WUGspace, Matt participates in and is witness to many interactions between Ipswitch and their customers. Comments Matt, “Ipswitch is the most accessible company I have worked with in the IT industry. They are ‘ridiculously’ responsive to their customers and pay attention to the customer input they receive on WUGspace. It’s amazing to watch customers provide feedback and then see those same ideas and features incorporated so quickly into future releases.”