A Prescription for 100% Uptime and Quality Patient Care

Atlantic Health System (AHS) delivers high quality, innovative, and personalized health care to millions of patients across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the New York metropolitan area. Security and privacy are paramount at AHS for both patient and clinician information. When moving to Epic EHR, AHS chose Pure Storage FlashArray with an Evergreen//Forever subscription to meet high standards for security, confidentiality, and availability, even during upgrades.

In healthcare, keeping critical technology operational and online can be a matter of life and death. It’s a responsibility that Mukund Hukeri, Manager of Information Technology at Atlantic Health System (AHS), takes very seriously.

“We spend time working to keep one step ahead of any potential problems so that we can rely on our IT systems to always be available,” he says. “My vision is to provide all services and data to both clinicians and patients when they need it, on demand and in real time.”
AHS prides itself on delivering high quality, innovative, and personalized health care to millions of patients across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the New York metropolitan area. The not-for-profit system has a workforce of around 20,000 team members working at 550 sites of care, including seven hospitals.

Most of the production environment runs on Pure Storage FlashArray™. This includes all mission-critical technology, from the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system and the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to the Ensemble interface engine, laboratory information systems, and the picture archiving and communication system (PACS). “Pure helps me achieve my goals by giving me the performance, redundancy, and security that I need to eliminate downtime and keep these systems running,” says Hukeri.

Security and privacy are paramount at AHS, as many systems contain highly sensitive information for both patients and clinicians. “In the healthcare industry, it’s not a question of if a ransomware attack will happen, but when,” says Hukeri. “Pure enhances our ability to manage risks associated with data recovery.”

AHS uses Commvault to write backups to Pure Storage FlashBlade® as well as capture snapshots of the replicated copy with immutable Pure Storage SafeMode™ Snapshots. In addition, FlashArray snapshots can be used to restore data stores quickly and recover applications running on virtual machines.

Pure1 serves as the single pane of glass for the entire Pure Storage fleet. It offers the three employees who oversee storage a glimpse into utilization and performance, as well as snapshot history.

AHS began its partnership with Pure Storage eight years ago when it made the move to the Epic EHR. Epic not only requires a high level of storage performance, but AHS must submit data to Epic to demonstrate that it meets standards for security, availability, and confidentiality of patient data. After launching the Epic environment on Pure, AHS consistently achieved 100% availability and exceeded even Epic’s highest performance standards.

The increased performance allows clinicians to work much more effectively. Nightly ETL processes now run much faster so that most reports are ready for users when they get to work in the morning. One clinical report used to take eight hours, but now takes significantly less time, enabling clinicians to see the most up-to-date results immediately.

Since first deploying FlashArray, AHS has taken advantage of the Evergreen//Forever subscription model to keep its storage modern and highly performant. AHS can upgrade without disruption and protect its storage investment, from the earliest FlashArray models to the latest FlashArray//XL. The latter will underpin a new VDI initiative that supports up to 7,000 concurrent users at any given time.

“Our organization continues to expand through acquisitions and partnerships, which means more patients coming to us and more technology required to support them,” says Hukeri. “Pure enables us to comfortably manage petabytes of data and deliver fast, reliable access to information for clinicians and patients.”

“Clinicians and patients have high expectations for our systems,” says Hukeri. “They want to focus on diagnosing problems and treating health issues, not waiting for systems to load. Pure helps us give clinicians the access to technology they expect so that they can focus on patient care.”