ExtraHop Significantly Reduces Troubleshooting Time for Steward Health Care System With Contextual Insight

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - March 18, 2014) - ExtraHop, the global leader in real-time wire data analytics for IT operational intelligence, today announced that Steward Health Care System is using the ExtraHop wire data analytics platform to dramatically improve real-time mobile access to critical healthcare applications and patient records across 11 hospitals and more than 100 ambulatory care clinics. With the help of ExtraHop's 2013 Partner of the Year, Presidio, Steward chose ExtraHop to gain critical insight into their IT environment, enabling them to see performance issues in context and rapidly resolve them for improved business operations and patient care.

Mobile devices and workstations are fast becoming an integral part of leading-edge patient care. At Steward, practitioners and employees rely on tablets, laptops, and more than 900 workstations on wheels (WOWs) to access over 200 different applications, including MEDITECH, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks for electronic health records (EHR). The availability and performance of these healthcare applications is critical for both employee productivity and the quality of patient care.

One of the most vexing challenges for Steward was ensuring rapid, reliable access to patient records through the eClinicalWorks EHR system. "If a nurse pulls a patient's medical records, it's typically not a very linear communication path," said Adam Hanson, Senior Director of Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Engineering at Steward. "That single mouse-click involves calls to multiple data sources, across the 30-or-so fileservers that hold code for the application, and then reassembling and presenting it through Citrix XenApp." 

The back-end complexity involved in accessing these medical records was compounded by the Steward IT team's lack of visibility into the environment. Network engineers and system administrators were spending, on average, more than two hours each day troubleshooting "nonobvious" performance issues. Steward brought in ExtraHop to gain the cross-tier, correlated visibility required to rapidly identify and resolve trouble spots and latencies across hospitals and clinics. Within an hour of installation, the ExtraHop appliance was providing valuable insight into application performance and availability.

Mat Demers, Director of Systems Engineering for Steward, said, "We used ExtraHop to pinpoint the cause of a slowdown for one of our 12 eClinicalWorks EHR deployments that our ambulatory clinics use …[we discovered that] it was due to how our production and replica databases were racked in our datacenter. Before ExtraHop, this was not an easy thing to diagnose -- all we could see was that there were lots of timeouts and just an overall bad user experience. ExtraHop provided the critical information we needed to not only solve the problem, but prevent it from happening again."

"When we first began working with Steward, they were suffering from a condition all too common in the healthcare industry -- how to efficiently and securely deliver critical data and applications to an increasingly mobile workforce," said Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. "Since deploying ExtraHop, Steward has seen a significant reduction in the time required to identify and troubleshoot performance problems as well as better performance from their MEDITECH and eClinicalWorks applications, saving caregivers hours per day."

"With ExtraHop, we're letting the doctors and nurses spend more time with patients instead of waiting for the application, or even worse -- resorting to paper and then manually re-entering data later," said Hanson.

In addition to streamlining troubleshooting, Steward uses ExtraHop to create performance baselines and track developing trends, empowering the IT team to rapidly and proactively respond to changes in the environment. With this visibility, the team can track and identify unusual spikes in communications between particular hosts for a particular protocol, error rates, or response-time latency. That information, delivered in real time, is then correlated to the number of calls to the help desk, enabling the team to quickly identify which issues are posing the greatest problems for end users.

For more information about how Steward is using ExtraHop, check out the case study. To learn more about the Five Ways Wire Data Enables Real-Time Healthcare Systems, read the new 7-page white paper.

About ExtraHop
ExtraHop is the global leader in real-time wire data analytics. The ExtraHop Operational Intelligence Platform analyzes all L2-L7 communications, including full bidirectional transactional payloads. This innovative approach provides the correlated, cross-tier visibility essential for application performance, availability, and security in today's complex and dynamic IT environments. The winner of numerous awards from Interop, TechTarget, and others, the ExtraHop platform scales up to 20Gbps in a single appliance, deploys without agents, and delivers tangible value in less than 15 minutes. Learn what we mean at www.extrahop.com or follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

About Steward Health Care System
Steward Health Care System (Steward) is the largest fully integrated community care organization and community hospital network in New England. Headquartered in Boston, Steward is the third largest employer in MA with more than 17,000 employees serving more than one million patients annually in more than 150 communities. Hospitals in the system include Saint Anne's Hospital in Fall River, Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton, Norwood Hospital, Carney Hospital in Dorchester, Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, Merrimack Valley Hospital in Haverhill, Morton Hospital in Taunton, Quincy Medical Center and New England Sinai Hospital in Stoughton. Other Steward Health Care entities include Steward Medical Group and Steward Home Care. Additional information is available at www.steward.org.

About Presidio
Presidio is the leading provider of professional and managed services for advanced IT solutions. By taking the time to deeply understand how our clients define success, we architect enduring technology solutions that address their business needs. Our approach blends the credibility to deliver practical results today, with the creativity to drive the business visions of tomorrow. More than 2,400 Presidio IT professionals, 1,500 of which are engineers with over 2,000 industry leading certifications, are based in 50+ offices across the US. We serve our clients through a unique, local delivery model while capitalizing on our scale as a multi-billion dollar industry leader. We are passionate about driving results for our clients and delivering the highest quality of service in the industry. For more information visit: www.presidio.com.