Increased patient engagement and satisfaction through improved digital interaction
Improved security posture and HIPAA compliance
Cut costs associated with unused and underutilized assets
The Beginning
Different teams with different tools led to service interruptions
Prisma Health provides clinical care, education, and research services for communities throughout upstate South Carolina. Operations include seven medical campuses and numerous outpatient and specialty facilities. Residency programs provide training for more than 400 physicians, nursing, and health students annually.
Prisma Health caregivers and staff work tirelessly to provide high quality, affordable healthcare to millions of area residents every year, and that has included deploying sophisticated clinical applications. But even as Prisma Health has embraced digital operations, managing the inherent complexity hasn't been seamless. Incidents and alerts were managed by different teams using different tools, which often led to service interruptions.
"Today, healthcare organizations aren't just measured on patient outcomes, they're also rated on patient experience," said Mike Shuford, a systems engineer at Prisma Health. "The ability to easily access a record, or to have a doctor rapidly send a prescription to your pharmacy before your appointment is over – those things matter. Every service disruption meant a hit to patient experience."
Using ExtraHop, we've been able to identify systems that weren't being used and saved the company money by having them decommissioned
Mike Shuford
Systems Engineer,
Prisma Health
The Transformation
ExtraHop changes the game on Epic.
Central to Prisma Health's operations is an electronic medical record (EMR) system. Prisma Health uses the Epic EMR to give caregivers on-demand access to patient records and allow patients to access their own medical information, schedule appointments, and communicate with their caregivers through a secure web portal.
"Epic is key to our ability to offer patients accessible healthcare," says Shuford. "But Epic is only as good as the technology that supports it. In our case, that means two data centers supporting simultaneous Epic instances and other tier one medical applications, as well as numerous remote sites."
Shuford's team manages this complex environment using ExtraHop. "ExtraHop is a game changer for us," he says. "Priority one and priority two alerts used to result in conference calls with everyone pointing fingers. ExtraHop gives us one data set on which everyone can agree. It not only helps us identify issues faster, it allows us to concentrate on fixing the problem instead of figuring out who is to blame."
According to Shuford, another key advantage of ExtraHop is its ease of use. "You don't need an advanced degree or to undergo extensive training to use ExtraHop. We were able to get the platform up and running quickly—and we saw immediate value."
The Benefits
Better care through immediate insights.
Better Patient Care – and Experience
In healthcare, application performance issues can have an almost immediate effect on clinical care and patient experience. With ExtraHop, Prisma Health can identify and fix application performance issues more efficiently than ever before. Real-time analytics and advanced machine learning deliver proactive, trend-based alerts about performance degradations that can impact end-user experience, and guided investigation capabilities help them rapidly find the root cause before it affects experience. Added visibility into Citrix has helped greatly with not only user experience, but other important initiatives such as meaningful use as well.
Real-time SSL Decryption
Healthcare organizations manage tremendous volumes of private data that, by law, must be protected. As organizations adopt SSL and TLS encryption for more of their application traffic, application performance management can become complicated. But with ExtraHop, Prisma Health can decrypt and analyze SSL and TLS 1.3 encrypted traffic at scale in real time.
"Epic traffic is secure. We imported the Epic certificates into ExtraHop, along with certificates for our electronic document management system," explains Shuford. "So not only are we compliant, we have full visibility into the packets for troubleshooting."
Supporting Continuous IT Improvement
With ExtraHop, Prisma Health is able to track and analyze performance data to identify areas where small improvements can pay big dividends. This ongoing analysis has helped Prisma Health proactively resolve issues and optimize their IT environment to be more efficient and secure.
"Using ExtraHop, we've been able to identify systems that weren't being used and saved the company money by having them decommissioned," says Shuford.