Case Study

Business challenge

Barriers to equitable healthcare are systemic and immense in the United States, and CHCN's patients are not immune to these challenges. CHCN's patients come from a variety of backgrounds, but many of them face significant challenges in gaining access to healthcare including poverty, lack of insurance, and language barriers. These barriers can make it difficult for the patients to get the care they need, when they need it. By providing multiple services like case management, specialist contracting, insurance processing, data analytics, and advancement of clinical best practices, CHCN has been tirelessly working to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and expand access to care for the underserved communities.

With the increasing demand for digital healthcare services, CHCN is continuously innovating to update and enhance its patient-facing technologies, including its patient portal, mobile app, and website while simultaneously trying to ensure optimal performance of their backend applications.

"With various interconnected systems handling patient records, scheduling, billing, and communication, our healthcare architecture is quite complex. One of our primary challenges is the criticality of our services. We are responsible for delivering healthcare to patients who require 24-hour care and this means that our applications must be highly available, reliable, and resilient. Any downtime or performance issues can directly impact patient care and safety," says Oliver Newman, IT systems administrator at CHCN. For granular visibility into its application infrastructure and to ensure 24/7 availability of its applications, CHCN turned to Applications Manager.

Lightening the load with proactive fault management

"For us, every second counts. The lesser the downtime, the better it is for us. We were particularly looking for a tool that could provide real-time insight and context into incidents impacting application performance," says Newman. Familiarity with the ManageEngine brand drove them to evaluate Applications Manager. With Applications Manager, CHCN's IT team is able to monitor all its mission-critical systems, get deeper application-level insights, and resolve issues with ease.

"Prior to using Applications Manager, addressing performance issues meant laboriously logging into each application, sifting through extensive lines of code, manually checking KPIs, and formulating a troubleshooting strategy," says Newman. This cumbersome process of data collection, impact assessment, and issue resolution used to consume valuable hours. The absence of unified data made it nearly impossible for CHCN to pinpoint the root causes of errors, further prolonging issue resolution timelines.

Since turning to Applications Manager, CHCN visualizes its crucial applications with a unified view. Now, with a single click CHCN is able to gain insight into a wealth of key metrics and reduce mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to respond (MTTR) from hours to minutes. Additionally, the product has proven to be an invaluable ally, swiftly alerting CHCN to potential crises and enabling it to take rapid, cost-saving actions.

Newman recounts an incident where the linchpin of CHCN's daily operations—Ezcap system, which helps manage patient data and healthcare records—encountered unforeseen performance problems. "In this critical situation, Applications Manager promptly detected anomalies in Ezcap's performance metrics, signaling a potential issue. Thanks to this early warning, our IT team swiftly jumped into action, identifying and mitigating the problem before it could escalate into a full-blown system outage. It nearly saved us from a staggering loss of $100,000," says Newman.

Additionally, Applications Manager also helps ensure the availability of CHCN's web portals. "Our web portal serves as a critical platform for healthcare providers and administrators to process insurance claims efficiently. Timely claim processing is essential for us to maintain the financial health of CHCN and ensure that patients receive proper coverage for their medical expenses," says Newman.

When CHCN witnessed a slowdown in the response time of its web portal, Applications Manager immediately detected the performance degradation and alerted CHCN. The tool helped CHCN drill down to the root cause of the issue: a database server was experiencing unusually high resource utilization, leading to delayed database queries and, subsequently, sluggish portal performance.

With the problem pinpointed, the IT team promptly optimized the database server configuration, allocated additional resources, and fine-tuned query performance. This allowed CHCN to process claims in a timely manner, ensuring that patients received the insurance coverage they needed without undue delays.

Leveraging the best of both worlds with ManageEngine OpManager

Aside from using Applications Manager, the team also uses ManageEngine OpManager. "We operate in a complex network infrastructure across multiple sites to provide our healthcare services. With OpManager's comprehensive network visualization capabilities we are able to get holistic insight into our entre network topology," says Newman.

By extensively monitoring the availability and performance of CHCN's routers, switches, printers, and other network devices, the team is able to promptly identify and diagnose issues. "With [OpManager's] add-ons, we are also able to monitor network traffic patterns continuously and detect network congestion during peak hours that often leads to data transfer between departments. This has helped us reduce communication delays and enhance the overall operational efficiency."

Additionally, OpManager also helps monitor CHCN's storage systems proactively. "We utilize network-attached storage (NAS) systems to store and retrieve patient records and diagnostic images. OpManager continuously monitors the health of our NAS systems, detecting any degradations in storage performance and promptly issuing alerts. With this capability, our IT team can take necessary actions, such as reallocating storage resources, optimizing data storage, or replacing failing drives. This proactive approach ensures that patient data remains accessible with minimal delays, ultimately enhancing the efficiency of our healthcare services," explains Newman.