Healthcare

Healthcare Case Study: Optimizing EHR System Performance and Cost Efficiency with Enteros UpBeat

Overview: In a highly dynamic and resource-intensive healthcare environment, where patient care is directly tied to the efficiency and reliability of IT systems, optimizing database performance and ensuring operational efficiency is crucial. A major healthcare provider with multiple hospitals across several regions was facing challenges in managing their Electronic Health Records (EHR) system, payer management application, and patient transaction processes. The organization needed a solution that would ensure high availability, performance optimization, and cost reduction across their IT infrastructure, specifically focused on database performance.

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Challenges:

Delayed Transactions and System Overload: The healthcare provider was experiencing issues with delayed responses in their critical “admit patient” transaction, which was impacting the speed and quality of patient care. About 1% of the requests were delayed, which, while seemingly small, resulted in a significant volume of patients being processed late, ultimately affecting operational efficiency.
Rising Memory Consumption: There were spikes in memory consumption on the clusters supporting the payer management application. This led to unpredictable performance, especially during high-traffic periods, such as at the beginning of insurance billing cycles.
Scalability Issues: With the acquisition of a new hospital system, the healthcare provider anticipated a 30% increase in patient volume and transaction load. This meant that their existing system, particularly their EHR system, would need to scale quickly. Determining how many additional web servers, app servers, virtual machines (VMs), and databases were required was a critical challenge.
User Experience Concerns: Doctors were accessing patient records via a newly rolled-out iPad app for their EHR system, but there was a need to assess whether this new technology was actually improving the documentation process and enhancing patient care. Analyzing whether IT investments were leading to measurable improvements in service quality was a key priority.

Solution: Enteros UpBeat Enteros UpBeat was deployed to address these operational and performance challenges. Here’s how the platform provided value across various areas:

1. Operational Intelligence: Proactive Issue Detection and Scaling

Enteros UpBeat’s advanced statistical learning algorithms proactively identified performance and scalability issues across the healthcare provider’s database infrastructure. By continuously measuring the performance of the EHR system and correlating these metrics with historical data, Enteros was able to pinpoint inefficiencies and potential points of failure before they became critical.

When the healthcare provider anticipated a 30% growth in patient transactions, Enteros UpBeat calculated the additional infrastructure needed to support this expansion. Through its predictive analytics, the platform recommended scaling requirements, including the number of additional web servers, application servers, VMs, and database instances needed to handle the increased load. This proactive approach allowed the IT team to prepare in advance and ensure a seamless experience for both healthcare providers and patients.

2. Troubleshooting: Investigating Delays in Patient Admission

Enteros UpBeat’s real-time monitoring and detailed performance insights helped identify that 1% of the patient admission requests were delayed due to inefficient database queries. Using Enteros’ 15-minute view, IT teams could quickly investigate and resolve the issue, reducing the delay time and improving the overall patient admission process. The tool’s visibility into transaction times and database queries allowed for immediate corrective actions, ensuring a faster and more reliable experience for patients.

3. Utilization: Addressing Memory Spikes in Payer Management Applications

With the healthcare provider’s payer management application experiencing memory spikes during peak insurance billing periods, Enteros UpBeat helped identify the workload changes that were causing the increased consumption. By analyzing memory utilization patterns, Enteros UpBeat provided actionable insights into how the database could be optimized to handle larger workloads without excessive memory usage, ensuring stable and consistent performance during high-traffic periods.

4. Business Intelligence: Real-Time Data for Financial and Operational Insights

Enteros UpBeat’s business intelligence capabilities empowered the healthcare provider with real-time insights into operational data. The platform provided metrics on the number of insurance payment requests made every minute, compared this against the previous month’s equivalent, and highlighted any anomalies. This allowed the financial operations team to track and compare transaction volumes across time periods, ensuring financial operations remained on track.

Moreover, Enteros’ ability to track and compare patient balances over time helped the provider assess whether patient debt had increased in the past three months, providing valuable insights into the financial health of the organization and enabling timely interventions.

5. End User Intelligence: Improving Service Quality for Doctors

One of the key goals was to evaluate whether the rollout of the iPad app for EHR had improved documentation efficiency and patient care. Enteros UpBeat provided detailed analysis on response time trends for doctors accessing patient records via the app. The platform showed that while the app improved accessibility, there were still occasional delays in fetching patient data during peak times. Armed with this insight, the IT team could address these issues, ensuring the system provided optimal performance and enhanced service quality for end-users.

6. Cost Optimization: Reducing Cloud Resource Spending

Enteros UpBeat also helped the healthcare provider reduce costs by identifying underutilized database resources and recommending the optimal scaling of cloud-based resources. By tracking database performance and usage patterns, the platform ensured that cloud resources were used efficiently, reducing unnecessary spend on excess capacity.

Results:

Improved Operational Efficiency: By addressing delayed transactions and optimizing resource usage, the healthcare provider saw a noticeable improvement in the speed of critical operations, particularly in the admit patient process.
Cost Savings: The proactive identification of underutilized cloud resources and the recommendation for scaling infrastructure based on real-time data allowed the organization to reduce unnecessary spending and improve financial efficiency.
Scalable Growth: The platform’s ability to forecast future system requirements enabled the healthcare provider to scale their EHR system in preparation for increased patient volume and transactions, ensuring business continuity during periods of growth.
Enhanced User Experience: Through the analysis of the iPad app rollout, Enteros provided insights that allowed the healthcare provider to enhance the app’s performance and improve the quality of service for doctors and patients.

Conclusion: By leveraging Enteros UpBeat, the healthcare provider was able to proactively manage database performance, optimize costs, and improve the user experience for doctors and patients. The platform’s advanced analytics and real-time monitoring not only solved immediate operational challenges but also helped the organization plan for future growth, ensuring that they could maintain high-quality patient care while optimizing IT performance and financial operations.