Lincoln County Hospital, established in 1952, has a long history of serving the residents of Lincoln and surrounding counties. As a cornerstone of the community, the hospital underwent a significant renovation between 2009 and 2011, investing millions of dollars to enhance the environment of care and healing for patients and their families. Today, Lincoln County Hospital is a 14-bed Critical Access Hospital providing acute and skilled inpatient care, emergency services, outpatient services, laboratory and diagnostic imaging, as well as a comprehensive range of physical, speech, and occupational therapies. The hospital also operates Rural Health Clinics in Lincoln and Sylvan Grove, making it a vital healthcare provider in the frontier region of north-central Kansas, known as Post Rock country.
Driven by a mission to improve the health care of the people they serve, Lincoln County Hospital continuously seeks to upgrade its infrastructure to meet the evolving needs of its patients. Recognizing the critical need for uninterrupted, high-performance IT systems, the hospital decided to invest in the latest server and resilient infrastructure to support its patient- facing services.
Challenges
Lincoln County Hospital encountered several significant challenges with its IT infrastructure:
Single Point of Failure: The hospital relied on a single storage server that, if failed or rebooted, would cause all connected servers to fail, requiring manual intervention to restart.
Aging Physical Hosts: Some of the hardware was aging and struggling to maintain adequate compute power for the necessary number of virtual machines.
Rack Space Constraints: Rack space was becoming increasingly scarce, complicating the addition of new hardware.
UPS Management: Managing the various uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) was becoming a monumental task, with individual backups not warning of battery failures until a power event occurred. This could result in emergency patients being turned away, the worst situation for patients and the hospital, and leading to significant monetary losses for the hospital.
Solution
To address these challenges, Lincoln County Hospital sought assistance from WCCiT, implementing Scale Computing virtual machines with smart resilient infrastructure and remote management from Reskube.
Scale Computing Servers: Scale Computing enabled the hospital to minimize the volume of cumbersome hardware in the server rack, provided ample storage and processing capabilities, and delivered the necessary redundancy and scalability to ensure continuous hospital operations.
Scale Computing enabled us to minimize the volume of cumbersome hardware in the server rack, offered ample storage and processing capabilities, and delivered the necessary redundancy and scalability to ensure continuous hospital operations for both critical care and administrative personnel.— Deven Fortkamp -- WCCiT Lead Engineer
Reskube Integration: By utilizing Reskube Edge technology, the hospital was able to simply deploy smart and resilient supporting infrastructure for the Scale Computing solution.
Reskube Edge delivered power and communications resilience and remote Out of Band Management of all computers, servers, and workstations on the network, even in the event of a site internet or power failure. This always allowed the hospital to pinpoint, recognize, and resolve any power or equipment problems remotely, resulting in cost savings and significantly increased reliability.
By utilizing Reskube Edge, we are able to have complete oversight and remote entry to computers, servers, and workstations, even in the event of a networking switch, internet connection failure or power outage. This empowers us to pinpoint, recognize, and resolve any power or equipment problems without physically being present, resulting in cost savings for both us and our managed client. Lincoln County Hospital has greatly profited from the dependable and all-encompassing Reskube Edge smart infrastructure.— Brent Sadler -- WCCiT CEO
Benefits
The integration of Scale Computing Platform and Reskube Edge delivered several key benefits to Lincoln County Hospital:
- Uninterrupted Service Delivery: The combination of high-performance servers and resilient infrastructure ensured that patient-facing services are always available.
- Efficient Remote Management: Reskube’s Remote Management System (RMS) allowed WCCiT to manage the hospital’s IT infrastructure remotely, even when site power or communications were down, providing timely support and maintenance without the need for on-site visits.
- Cost Reduction: By mitigating downtime and enhancing management efficiency, Reskube significantly cut operational costs.
- Enhanced Service Delivery: The hospital staff could focus more on patient care, confident that their critical systems were robust and well-managed.
Conclusion
The deployment of Scale Computing Platform and Reskube at Lincoln County Hospital has successfully addressed the hospital’s need for continuous, reliable, and remotely managed IT services. By investing in this advanced infrastructure, Lincoln County Hospital has ensured uninterrupted service delivery, even in the face of power and communication disruptions.
The expertise of WCCiT in managing the IT systems remotely has further enhanced the hospital’s operational efficiency. As a result, the hospital staff can now dedicate more time and resources to patient care, secure in the knowledge that their IT systems are robust and resilient.
Implementing Scale Computing and Reskube has transformed our IT infrastructure, ensuring continuous and reliable operations crucial for both critical care and administrative functions. The ability to manage and resolve issues remotely has been a game-changer, allowing us to focus on what we do best - providing exceptional patient care.— Tawnya Seitz -- CEO/Administrator, Lincoln County Hospital