Smart O&M Solution for Hospitals

I. Background

Driven by IT transformation, the construction of smart hospitals becomes an inevitable trend. During the construction of smart hospitals, O&M management matters a lot. With the changes in the management objectives, scope, objects, and management depth of hospital IT O&M, the construction of the IT O&M platform is undergoing tremendous changes in the direction of integration, automation, intelligence, visualization and agility. Therefore, the brand-new H3C U-Center Smart O&M Platform came into being.

The H3C smart O&M solution for hospitals is a comprehensive O&M management platform solution that aims at business-oriented services, integrates comprehensive management of cloud-network-terminal ICT infrastructure resources, provides flexible automated scheduling oriented to business scenarios, and meets customer IT service management and resource management needs.

New O&M challenges brought by the full cloud adoption of IT systems

In the dual-mode scenario of traditional data centers and cloud data centers, multiple networks are physically isolated, and multiple O&M systems are relatively fragmented, making it impossible for efficient closed-loop management. Hence, it is urgent to solve the unified O&M management issue.

New O&M challenges brought by digital business experience

The increasingly complex business support system and the transformation of the traditional system architecture into a hybrid cloud environment, microservices, and container architecture further increase the complexity of the IT system. There is a solid barrier between the IT department and fragmented O&M tools, lacking end-to-end integrated O&M tools.

New O&M challenges brought by the advent of new techniques

With the comprehensive construction of smart hospitals, the number of smart applications, devices, and terminals has exploded. The way to accomplish automated, intelligent, and visualized unified O&M has become the top priority of O&M management.

II. Overview of solution

Service adaptation layer

Provides various rich collection and processing engines and protocol adapters for obtaining comprehensive key O&M information about the converged infrastructure such as operating status, performance, configuration, and logs, which are processed, analyzed, and displayed uniformly via the data processing center of the platform.

Converged infrastructure monitoring and management

This solution enables unified monitoring and management of converged infrastructure resources such as network, host, storage, database, middleware, application system, and virtualization, to accomplish management functions such as converged topology, performance, fault, configuration, security, service application traffic, and visual 3D equipment room.

Automated O&M management

This solution provides automated deployment methods based on daily O&M scenarios. Meanwhile, it can schedule and arrange automated operations for complex O&M scenarios, cross-platform operation, and cross-system operation, which greatly improves O&M delivery efficiency and reduces TCO.

Resource configuration management

This solution provides automated discovery of all resources, automated service relationship mapping and auditing; combines with components such as infrastructure management, automatic O&M management, and service management to achieve scenario-based resource scheduling and management; quickly connects to the third-party resource configuration data source through the integrated interface of the unified external data source to realize the integration of configuration data of different systems.

With the comprehensive construction of smart hospitals, the number of smart applications, devices, and terminals has exploded. The integrated U-Center O&M platform enables visualized, centralized, and smart O&M.

III. Highlights of solution

IV. Best practices

West China Hospital of Sichuan University (WCH)

WCH is not only the national center for the diagnosis and treatment of critical diseases in west China, but also the largest comprehensive hospital with a single site. It is the largest medical testing center in China and the first to pass College of American Pathologists (CAP) accreditation. It was announced by the National Health Commission as the first batch of pilot hospitals for multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment of tumors.

WCH's previous O&M system lacks effective means to monitor its IT infrastructure resources, and could not respond in time to some IT failures. Although there are many IT O&M tools, the operations are pretty complex since different O&M operations require the use of different tools. Besides, some failures of the service system cannot be effectively detected and need the notification of the business department. Therefore, the management process of IT O&M services needs to be standardized and electronic to meet the hospital O&M requirements. After the deployment of the H3C unified O&M platform, the IT system of the hospital fully covers the monitoring and management of the management objects, management functions, and management effects. Moreover, business monitors and IT monitors are organically related, which help effectively locate system failures to find and prevent faults timely and accurately. This ensures the high availability of the hospital's important service systems. The unified O&M platform has established a service-centered O&M service management system, and sorted out system documents such as organizational structure specification of IT O&M, and O&M management methods. In addition, the unified O&M platform portal enables the unified management of information flows in the IT O&M environment, and the visualization of the big-screen can display the O&M view and business data that hospital leaders concern about; 3D dynamic environment supervision of the equipment room provides visualized temperature and humidity map, cabinet capacity view, and UPS view.

Guangdong Provincial Hospital of TCM

Founded in 1933, Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine is one of the earliest TCM hospitals in modern history in China, and is hailed as "the first in Nanyue Xinglin". At present, the hospital has developed into a large-scale comprehensive TCM with six campuses, namely, Dade Road General Hospital, Ershadao Hospital, Guangzhou Charity Hospital, Zhuhai Hospital, University Town Hospital, and Guangzhou United Family Hospital, as well as three outpatient departments, namely, Guangzhou Xiatang, Tianhe, and Shijing. In 2018, the number of outpatient visits reached 7.02 million and the number of patient admission was 0.144 million. The scale and strength of the hospital rank the top among TCMs in China.

However, its previous O&M system lacks effective means to monitor its IT infrastructure resources, and relies on manual inspection. The IT O&M personnel are busy with troubleshooting, which is time-consuming and affects fault disposal speed. Technicians communicate with each other about the project progress via emails, the project files are not uniformly managed, and the assets are managed via Excel files. All of these affect the accuracy and sharing of information.

The H3C unified O&M platform that has been deployed in Guangdong Provincial Hospital of TCM, automatically provides 24 × 7 monitoring of core systems such as HIS/LIS/PACS and enables timely detection of system failures. The front-line departments can quickly report the fault if there is one, and the fault will automatically go to the proper O&M department, enabling improved failure processing efficiency and faster business recovery. It decodes the complex IT environment into identifiable and manageable resource objects so that the information and states of resources within its life cycle can be managed, to realize the interconnection of assets and data between O&M systems. The deployment of the unified O&M platform improves the visibility and quantification of the daily O&M of various information systems, improves the operating efficiency of the IT system, and ensures the stable, efficient, safe, and uninterrupted operation of the business.