Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers and storage help deliver cost-effective scalability, reliability, security, and performance.

Solution brief

these growing volumes of data, IT has the opportunity to reduce the cost of care while improving the quality of care and quality of life for patients. One way is to apply data center analytics to EHR data to deliver greater patient insight and care. By 2016, it’s expected that 50% of hospitals will use analytics tools to improve patient care, up from just 10% in 2011.⁴

Furthermore, healthcare IT can get better control of growing capacity costs by virtualizing compute and storage resources so they can be combined easily into flexibly shared pools on the fly. This drives up infrastructure utilization and helps to contain capital investment costs, while at the same time making the compute and storage resources simpler to manage.

Healthcare Challenges and OpportunitiesHospital administrators and Chiefs of Medicine strive to deliver the best possible patient care, while at the same time making the cost more affordable. Digitizing patient records and the medical images help clinicians deliver higher quality diagnosis and treatment. However, the growing amount of data from Electronic Health Records (EHR) places enormous strains on IT and data center resources.

Healthcare data is growing at a staggering rate— over 40% annually.¹ By 2020, EHR is expected to require over 2000 exabytes—that’s two billion terrabytes.²

Unfortunately, healthcare IT spending is not only failing to keep up with this rate of growth, but is expected to actually fall.³ And today’s data center infrastructures add to the problem, as they are often based on proprietary storage and network technologies that are difficult and costly to manage and scale.

Healthcare IT decision makers need ways to scale faster and more cost effectively. But beyond simply scaling storage and acessibility for

Web-scalable solutions for EHR

TransformingHealthcare IT ThroughSoftware-Defined Infrastructure

Large medical complexes may produce up to 1TB of new data each day, including data from patient systems, financial systems, personnel systems, and office applications.Erasmus Medical Center Case Study, 20156

Transforming Healthcare Through Software-Defined Infrastructure

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Another opportunity for healthcare IT is to create an infrastructure that better supports innovative, emerging trends. These include collecting and analyzing data from new devices—such as wearables and other connected medical devices—that can provide deeper and more frequent information about patient conditions and trends. By making the infrastructure simpler to deploy and maintain, new applications

to address emerging trends can be brought online much more quickly.

Another important trend, Telemedicine, is on pace to grow 18.5% annually between 2012 and 2018, and to reduce the cost of care without impacting its quality.⁵ Enabling applications and services that facilitate Telemedicine aligns IT squarely with the organizational goals of hospitals and facilities.

The Software-Defined Infrastructure AdvantageA Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) based on Intel® architecture can help hospitals and healthcare facilities deliver data center services more cost-effectively, while enabling IT to deliver valuable new services and seize new opportunities faster and more easily. With SDI, all data center resources— compute, network and storage—are virtualized and orchestrated, enabling

far greater utilization and automation capabilities to reduce time required to provision, manage and scale the infrastructure.

Key elements of SDI include:

• Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

• Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

• Software-Defined Storage (SDS)

And in an environment of increased compliance regulations and growing threats, all of these efficiencies and opportunities must be delivered with the highest possible security. Healthcare IT must continue to better protect its infrastructure resources and sensitive data from these threats.

A Software-Defined Infrastructure can help healthcare facilities resolve challenges and realize new opportunities by reorganizing legacy networks, as shown above, into a more flexible SDN. As a result, IT can enable a more application-aware network, increase agility and flexibility for apps and services, and optimize cycle management.

Legacy Infrastructure Software-based Infrastructure

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For more information on Intel® solutions for healthcare, visit www.intel.com/healthcare

Copyright © 2016 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. Printed in USA Please Recycle 334041-001US1 http://www.emc.com/analyst-report/digital-universe-healthcare-vertical-report-ar.pdf2 CIO.com “How CIOs Can Prepare for the Data ‘Tsunami’,” December, 20143 Gartner Group http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/31357184 Frost & Sullivan, “U.S. Hospital Health Data Analytics Market”, August, 20125 Research and Markets, “Global Telemedicine Market Outlook 2018”, March, 20146 http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/getpdf.aspx/4AA5-3434EEW.pdf?ver=Rev%202Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Performance varies depending on system configuration. No computesystem can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn move at https://www.intel.com.

Tests document performance of components on a particular test, in specific systems. Differences in hardware, software, or configuration will affect actual performance. Consult other sources of information to evaluate performance as you consider your purchase. For more complete information about performance and benchmark results, visit http://www.intel.com/performance.

Cost reduction scenarios described are intended as examples of how a given Intel-based product, in the specified circumstances and configurations, may affect future costs and provide cost-savings. Circumstances will vary. Intel does not guarantee any costs or cost reduction.

Nutanix EPICSolutions such as Nutanix Epic help you accelerate your EHR deployments and drive increased adoption with its web-scale converged infrastructure architecture. Validated to run Epic Hyperspace application VMs and VDI, it results in a standardized, repeatable, and cost-effective solution for HRE deployments, with predictable performance and scalability.

www.nutanix.com

Software-Defined Networking

SDN centralizes network intelligence and control of network traffic. The SDN controller can “listen” to network components to gain insight into their current state and “talk” to those components to control traffic patterns and automate enforcement of network and security policies. The controller communicates with all components in a standardized manner, providing IT with greater choice and reducing CapEx. SDN automation capabilities make the network more self-aware, self-healing and self-scaling, reducing manual labor and OpEx.

Network Function Virtualization

NFV eliminates the need for proprietary, fixed-function network appliances, replacing them with virtual machines that perform those same services on open, commonly available, Intel® processor-based servers. Services can automatically scale on demand and be located anywhere across the infrastructure. NFV helps simplify the network, reduce sprawl, and improve manageability while reducing CapEx and OpEx.

Software-Defined Storage

SDS enables storage resources to move from siloed resources using proprietary protocols to a common, virtualized resource pool of storage. Advanced or- chestration of these resources enables enhanced services and capabilities to be applied, such as automated tiering of hot-warm-cold based on accessibility needs, de-duplication, compression, encryption and more.

SDI Benefits

The major benefits of SDI for hospitals and healthcare facilities include:

• Reduced CapEx through consolidation of physical resources and having a greater number of choices when purchasing components

• Reduced OpEx through automation and orchestration, decreasing labor costs and improving resource utilization

• Improved agility and patient care by enabling innovative new services and capabilities to be brought online faster—in minutes rather than weeks