Transformation of your hospital or healthcare systems data center strategy can ultimately play a significant role in improving patient health. Many factors contribute to the need for strategic transformation and the ability to rapidly adapt. The traditional challenges of rapid data growth, increasing complexity of an application portfolio, the need to service a wider geographic network of allied providers, increasing resiliency requirements, and proven backup and recovery methods have been difficult to manage in data centers that may be obsolete or lack capabilities to cope with these issues. It is a challenge to develop a multiyear strategic plan while facing budget issues and the need allocate resources in a more efficient manner.

What's driving the change

The traditional approach to managing data center options and application portfolio’s at the enterprise and clinical level has a more complex set of solution options than ever before. As more workloads are evaluated for public/private cloud and SaaS an in-depth analysis of where application workloads are best run is needed to understand the mix of owned data centers, use of colocation, and the rate of cloud adoption. Understanding the technical options in terms of the underlying costs, both operating and capital expense is critical to implementing a plan that hits both long term IT and Financial goals.

The four critical verticals associated with Healthcare (Clinical, Research, Enterprise, and Imaging) are challenged to keep pace with this explosion of data and growth of interconnected support devices. These factors call for a robust data center and multi-cloud strategy

Clinical: The Clinical vertical represents the highest degree of resiliency requirements, back up, and uptime. Specific applications include Pharmacy, nurse call, patient scheduling, surgical rotation, radiology, imaging, and traffic. This is the front end between the hospital or healthcare facility and the patient. An example would be the movement of the patients within the facility, their location, and the time spent in that specific location.

Research: Most major hospitals and healthcare systems participate in research (revenue and non-revenue) at either the theoretical, applied, or clinical level. Some institutions also require High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments that need higher density power requirements and engineered cooling solutions. These research requirements create special challenges in developing a long term strategy.

Enterprise: This vertical represents the application portfolio that manages the administrative side of the institution. In addition to the normal accounting, HR, and other backend services, it also manages the revenue side or “payer” application interface to insurance and government for service reimbursement. This particularly becomes a challenge in the era of Some hospitals and healthcare system mergers and acquisitions. Managing multiple environments and consolidating them over a period of time again requires a “playbook” approach to understand how to maintain services while controlling cost as data center sources are changed.

Imaging: Is the fastest-growing segment in terms of data volume. Petabytes of data are constantly being created and accessed within a hospital, regional locations, and sometimes globally. Latency and image quality are critical in the decision for storage locations, network latency issues, and archival solutions.

These verticals must meet all requirements to avoid any disruption of day-to-day activities or unplanned operating costs. Each application will need to have a defined location on where it will reside, whether on-prem, in a colocation data center, or in the cloud-based on criticality and cost. Although it may seem like a macro-level decision, this can directly impact a patient individually. For example, a nurse having trouble with an unresponsive or slow EMR system could delay treatment or medication to a patient due to connectivity issues with the cloud.

With the right data center sourcing and multi-cloud strategy, you will obtain a deeper understanding of the latency limits, as well as the tolerance for downtime for each application in the healthcare environment.

How can you meet these requirements?

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll uses a powerful analysis methodology to create a set of comparative solutions for a multiyear data center sourcing solution. This allows for the collaborative creation of a strategy that uses the best alternatives for managing your application portfolio and investing in the right options over time. Understanding your present state, your future state needs, and the solutions that fit your environment (data centers, colocation, public/private cloud, SaaS, etc) and budget allow for the creation of a strategy that can actually be implemented, over time.

What services are included?

Evaluate client applications with automated analysis tools, efficient stakeholder interviews, allows for an understanding of the app portfolio and future state options

Recommendations of application disposition and or transformation targets

Modeling of IT inventories and future IT architectures (server, storage, network) that can affect the data capacity and density requirements over time. This can result in a phased implementation model and the requirements for any owned data centers to be remediated or built/re-built, or the use of colocation options

Identification of key technical and business requirements, such as tolerance for downtime, latency limits, security, and regulatory requirements, etc.

Capture of non-technical constraints and or directives which include community issues, company history/image, etc.

Working collaboratively with our client, EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll will help define, evaluate, and recommend one or more alternative strategies that consider different mixes of on-premise data centers, colocation, and private/public cloud providers.

A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model will illustrate the Opex and Capex impact over 5 to 10 years to further understand the impact of facility, technology, and implementation options on budget. This can be the most useful tool because it allows an organization to manage the rate of change that it can safely adopt.

Case Studies

Confidential managed care health care organization
Data Center Roadmap and Data Center Strategy
Minneapolis, MN

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll evaluated the current state of the client’s existing data centers, provided future state recommendations that accommodated technology growth for the next ten years and provided as much conceptual detail as possible to allow for the most accurate costing to make a go-forward decision.

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll worked with this client in data center planning workshops, to outline availability / reliability / disaster recovery planning, technology systems deployment, technology systems growth, and network architecture considerations.

Confidential global life sciences company
10-15 Year Master Plan
Europe & USA

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll provided an assessment that would help define the production space and DR site space requirements for the next 10 to 15 years.

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll also provided a physical facility inspection for the client to make an intelligent selection of each facility as well as assist the client in negotiating long term lease contracts. Additionally, EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll provided technology infrastructure design services to provide the client with construction-level documents for execution by a professional contractor. EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll is also assisting the client during the construction phase of the projects.

Confidential Hospital
Data Center Strategy and Consolidation
Multiple Locations

Provided Strategic Services that included Data Center Evaluation and Consolidation. The engagement consisted of outlining current-state and future-state strategies, processes, and methodologies for and identifying gaps/ deficiencies with estimated timelines and ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude) costs.

The EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll team mapped these findings into an unbiased future-state data center strategy that holistically integrated the elements of operational continuity, technology, and data center facilities.

Cofnidential healthcare services
Hybrid IT Strategy
Louisville, KY

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll investigated and assessed the client’s current data center environment, their ability to accommodate technology growth for their next five (5) years. This included assessment of future needs and the driving forces behind data center facility and IT such as future vision for applications, high availability (HA), business continuity/ disaster recovery, specialized space, etc.

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll also provided site auditing to determine the condition of the electrical and mechanical infrastructures supporting mission critical functions, as well as a risk evaluation of the systems and equipment utilizing probability risk analysis (PRA) methodology. This determined the risks and availability benefits for purposes of directing limited capital and expense resources to areas where there is the most benefit for the investments of those resources.

Confidential Medical Center
Master Plan
Rancho Mirage, CA

EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll performed master planning and consulting services that analyzed the client’s IT and data center environments to develop an optimized data center migration strategy and implementation plan, which included both data migration and physical relocation services. The EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll team utilized a tool to map applications to infrastructure to determine the optimal move groups which were ultimately reduced to three (3) move waves with the most critical waves occurring at the end of the project.

the EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll consultants also provided program management services end-to-end, analyzed and inventoried the hospital's infrastructure components, connections, and applications, provided migration analysis, design, and planning services, reconfigured the SAN fabric to simplify ongoing administration, provided data migration services, and assisted with deployment of new BladeSystem enclosures.

Confidential University Hospital and Research Institution

Data Center & Multi-Cloud Strategy

New York, NY

The client was looking to perform a comprehensive Data Center and Multi-Cloud Strategy that included the capacity of the existing facilities, a cloud adoption analysis to quantify the IT infrastructure cost drivers that move to the public cloud, a future state planning and a co-location RFI process and Load requirements. EYP MCF, Part of Ramboll provided multiple scenarios including projected cost of cloud, Co-Location providers and owned sited based on projected loads and iDR analysis.

The project includes the data center hall MEP design and technology infrastructure, installation, and commissioning of a new High-Performance Data Center.

Confidential Hospital & Healthcare Institution

Multi-Cloud Strategy & Co-Location Selection

Boston, MA

One of the country’s largest healthcare consortiums was in the process of merging. This merge included multiple regional hospitals. The hospital IT and Real Estate organizations were seeking a strategy to combine and consolidate data centers between all hospitals. The goal was to modernize, increase resiliency, reduce cost, exploit new architectures, and reduce the reliance upon leased space. They needed someone to help these two large organizations come to develop options and costs for this complex planning effort. The options included a Data Center Sourcing Strategy to discuss the options to host their applications in different Multi-Cloud environments (In-house, Co-Location providers and Private Cloud Providers)

Services