Customer Spotlight: Northwestern Community Hospital
A world-class medical provider, Northwest Community Hospital provides a full range of medically advanced inpatient and outpatient services. Located in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, Northwest Community Hospital boasts over 900 physicians and 3,700 employees including nurses, allied health professionals, administrative and support personnel. The hospital cares for over 500,000 patients annually and is well-recognized for its advanced medical technology, caring culture, and clinical expertise.
Northwest Community Hospital’s IT department is tasked with monitoring a very extensive network, including the main hospital, three external treatment centers, five medical office locations, an outpatient surgery center, home healthcare services, a wellness center, a fitness center, an imaging center and a youth center.
With such a widespread network — and with plans for major expansion within the next year — it was critical for Northwest Community Hospital’s IT department to maximize network effectiveness and efficiency, but without hiring additional IT staff. An automated solution was needed that would take the manual labor out of administering the network.
“We needed a solution that could be used by our entire IT department, whether they are new to the industry or have years of management experience. Furthermore, we wanted a solution that would automate much of our daily management tasks.” said Tyrone Mitchell, project manager at Northwest Community Hospital.
Northwest Community Hospital chose NetMRI because of its ability to simplify the management of the network. This single solution takes an integrated network approach with its ability to audit, analyze, and automate the day-to-day tasks of running their network.
NetMRI proactively detects performance, configuration and policy issues compared against corporate and built-in industry best practices. It automates data collection and performs deep network analysis, prioritizing potential network issues for the IT department. NetMRI automates the network management for the hospital, allowing the IT staff to focus on the pending expansion.
By providing the IT staff with a high-level scorecard and a list of real-time issues showing the network’s overall performance, NetMRI enables them to quickly and easily view any issues before they become problems. When an issue is identified, the staff can drill down to in-depth detail and analysis in order to rectify this issue. Especially helpful is the automatic detection of incorrect configuration changes and configuration policy exceptions. Because the hospital’s IT staff is quickly informed, they are more proactive; solving problems before the hospital’s applications and processes are significantly affected.
Since implementing NetMRI, Northwest Community Hospital’s IT staff has taken a more proactive approach to managing its network. Now, NetMRI acts as a true extension of the hospital’s IT department, automating its network management processes and as a result, significantly reducing its troubleshooting time. “NetMRI has taken the grunt work out of network management,” said Mitchell. “It steers us in the right direction by pointing to specific issues in the network, and prevents harmful problems from occurring.”
