| | Island Hospital in Washington State uses WhatsUp Gold to ensure prompt patient care due to network up-time equaling 99.999%
Patients and insurance companies constantly put more and more pressure on hospitals to keep costs down. But both groups also demand the best healthcare possible. This puts hospitals between the proverbial rock and a hard place -- succeeding in both areas is daunting.
To meet both of these challenges, Island Hospital in Washington State turned to WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch Inc. WhatsUp Gold maps, monitors, notifies and reports on the status of devices on a company s computer network. The software provides a detailed view of a network so Island Hospital s IT administrators can understand and manage network resources better. When a device or server goes down, WhatsUp Gold launches alarms that notify the staff via e-mail, pager, desktop or phone.
The hospital benefits greatly from these network monitoring features because its facilities are geographically spread out. . The hospital is based on Fidalgo Island in Anacortes, Washington and also has facilities on Orcas Island and Lopez Island. Island Hospital personnel also provide services to all the San Juan Islands. On an annual basis the organization treats about 150,000 patients from 15 communities.
When first considering WhatsUp Gold seven years ago, the hospital wanted to ensure its network computer system functioned smoothly 7x24x365 so doctors, patients and other medical personnel could access critical patient information and treat patients properly at all times. But the hospital also needed to accomplish this at the lowest cost possible.
Our goal is to keep the network running properly with a relatively small IT staff, said Rick Kiser, Assistant Director of IS for Island Hospital.
The hospital has about 750 users across five facilities and supports them with only five IT people. Kiser and just one other person on the staff monitor the network, which includes 21 servers, WAN connections, and other network appliances. Along with the limited staff, the hospital required Kiser to find a low-cost solution when he went looking for a network monitoring solution.
Before WhatsUp Gold, we always responded to problems after they occurred, Kiser said. This put a lot of pressure on us because once a problem occurs on a hospital network, it s already an urgency. The medical personnel involved and their patients need the problem resolved right away. No one wants to be held up when they need medical care. Kiser thus set out to find a solution that would proactively identify problems before they occurred.
One of the solutions that Kiser considered was HP OpenView. But the exorbitant cost, as well as the software s level of difficulty to learn and administer, made this option impractical, despite the proficiency of the technology. We would have had to hire another full-time person just administer the application, Kiser said. The application also did not give us an easy read of which network devices were up and which were down. We needed something that would simply and quickly tell us where problems were developing.
As an alternative to HP OpenView, Kiser turned to WhatsUp Gold, which he had read about while doing Internet research. WhatsUp Gold costs significantly less, about 40-percent the cost of the HP OpenView software, Kiser said. In addition, the training for HP OpenView was over 10 times more expensive. But the main reason we chose the Ipswitch software was its ease of use. We needed minimal training time and we could intuitively generate performance information.
Kiser was also impressed with how quickly and clearly WhatsUp Gold identifies potential problems. We usually know about problems before the end-users are impacted, Kiser said. The graphics make it easy to discern problems, and most of the time we do what we need to do behind the scenes -- end users never even know that a problem was about to hit them.
WhatsUp Gold has made monitoring the network much easier for Kiser and his staff. Even if we re off-site, we re notified by cell phone so we can dial in over our VPN and try to rectify the situation, Kiser said. The solution has allowed us to get more sleep on a regular basis we are not nearly as stressed out.
With the help of WhatsUp Gold, Kiser said the network functions optimally about 99.999-percent of the time. That s about as much up-time as you re ever going to get, Kiser said. We can be proactive and prevent most down times from ever occurring.
Since Kiser began using WhatsUp Gold, he has gone through several upgrades. We started on the shareware version and now have version 8.0, Kiser said. The upgrades have always gone smoothly -- we ve implemented them on our own and have not needed technical support. The software truly is plug-and-play.
In assessing the new features of version 8.0, Kiser feels that the enhanced Windows NT service monitoring is particularly beneficial. It helps us easily restart our NT4 boxes, Kiser said. We also like how it sends out notifications when any service failures occur.
WhatsUp Gold 8.0 also assists with the hospital s HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance in security areas. Kiser has deployed the software to watch for locked-out accounts, which may represent possible hackers trying to hit an account. WhatsUp Gold also monitors our firewall and VPN servers to make sure they run properly and that no one is trying to infiltrate them, Kiser said.
Summarizing Island Hospital s experience, Kiser said, Over the entire seven years we have used WhatsUp Gold, I have not come across any other product that provides the status of network devices so quickly with graphics that so easy to interpret. Add in the fact that the price is far below comparable software, and Ipswitch has come up with a superb product.
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