Efficient Digital Foundation for Better Patient Care

Intermountain Health provides patient care across seven states, relying on technology to be fast and highly available for its 33 hospitals and 385 clinics. Its merger with SCL Health introduced the organization to Everpure. With the performance and efficiency delivered by Everpure, Intermountain Health now manages 7PB of its data for two regions with just two people. With Everpure, capacity limits and outages are no longer concerns.

When healthcare professionals look for a way to improve patient care and patient outcomes, fast and reliable technology is often a top factor. It allows healthcare providers to access patient records and view scans quickly, which ultimately leads to faster diagnoses and more seamless care.

Intermountain Health views technology as an important factor in delivering proactive healthcare to patients across the western and central United States. The non-profit organization operates 33 hospitals and 385 clinics across seven states and has grown in recent years through mergers with other healthcare organizations, including SCL Health. Jarrod Psencik, Director of Infrastructure, originally joined SCL Health and now manages IT for two of the three operating regions at Intermountain Health.

Psencik knows that healthcare professionals in all locations need rapid access to records, applications, and data. Years ago, when the legacy spinning disk storage at SCL Health started reaching capacity limits, Psencik decided to replace it with Everpure technology.

“In the eight years since we’ve been on Everpure, we’ve had zero outages,” says Psencik. “We can manage seven petabytes of data with just two full time employees, freeing up resources that we can invest in delivering the highest standard of patient care.”

Before migrating to Everpure, the legacy disk storage struggled when pushed past 80% of its capacity, slowing clinical processes. It also required upgrades every few years, which were costly and required complicated coordination between multiple application teams and vendors, all leading to unnecessary downtime.

With Everpure FlashBlade®, Intermountain Health delivers maximum performance for its Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), which securely stores the high-resolution medical images that play an important role in patient diagnosis and treatment. Everpure FlashArray//X™ supports all other systems, ranging from electronic medical records (EMR) to medical billing to VMware workstations.

The increased performance allowed Psencik to reduce the storage footprint in the data center from a full rack to just 3U of storage, a 93% space savings. This translated to significant power savings as well, of over $37,000 annually. “We expected our costs to rise after moving from spinning disks to all-flash arrays, especially with the performance gains Pure delivers. But we actually saved money and now operate more sustainably, which is just mind-blowing,” Psencik says.

“We’re very consistent about refreshing our controllers. Our first array is still in production and performing on par with our new arrays thanks to Evergreen.” Jarrod Psencik, Director Of Infrastructure, Intermountain Health.

For the IT team, the efficiency and security of Everpure help it stand out. Psencik can manage all Everpure systems from a single platform with Pure1®. It offers visibility across the environment from a single dashboard, reducing time spent configuring, monitoring, and analyzing the storage environment.

Through the Evergreen//Forever™ subscription, Intermountain Health also gains access to non-disruptive controller upgrades that keep the storage running like new. “We’re very consistent about refreshing our controllers,” says Psencik. “Our first array is still in production and performing on par with our new arrays thanks to Evergreen.”

Security is top of mind when dealing with personal medical information, but Everpure helps simplify and strengthen data security and business continuity plans. The built-in SafeMode™ Snapshot capabilities in FlashArray™ secures data with immutable snapshots for an extra layer of protection.

“I believe in simplification and standardization in IT to maximize efficiency,” says Psencik. “We try to do as much as we can using top vendors who we can trust, and that means choosing Pure. We don’t need to put as much energy into validating work or staying on call overnight, which means we can invest more time in providing new and improved IT services for clinicians and patients.”

Healthcare workers notice the difference in performance. Clinicians can fully load even the largest PACS images in five seconds or less, down from 20 seconds with spinning-disk storage. This means less time waiting for applications to load, and more time to spend reading images.

“My mom was a nurse, and every time she had to use a new technology, she would tell me how painful it was,” says Psencik. “I knew Pure was the right solution when we received zero complaints after going live. Our clinicians love how quickly and easily they can access critical patient data.”