Northwest Community Hospital

Challenge

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 or costly outside resources. The IT staff spent countless hours managing the network and needed an automated solution 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.

Solution

Northwest Community Hospital chose NetMRI, a proactive network management solution, 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 Northwest Community Hospital’s expansive 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, eliminating much of the IT staff’s manual labor.

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 is immediately notified and, with a single click, they can drill down to in-depth detail and analysis in order to rectify this issue. This is especially helpful in detecting network changes and policy failures, by constantly checking running configuration of network devices against policy and/or previous configuration settings. Because the hospital’s IT staff is quickly informed, they are more proactive, promptly evaluating the situation and solving any problem before the network, and therefore the hospital, is significantly affected.

As an automated solution, NetMRI takes the worry and hassle out managing the network, so Northwest Community Hospital can continue to keep the focus on what’s most important, ensuring the health and happiness of it patients.

Summary

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.”