Performance Case Study

Region of South Denmark

The Region of Southern Denmark decided to run the electronic patient journal (EPJ) – and they use PerformanceGuard to constantly analyze the delivery

Facts

Company Name: Region of South Denmark
Customer since: 2012
Website: www.regionsyddanmark.dk

In the Region of Southern Denmark, more than 21,000 employees work in the health sector. A large part of them work at one of the region’s many hospitals

User data tell a good story

It was a momentous decision when the Region of South Denmark
decided to insource the operation of their electronic patient records.
A project which had high initial costs but will pay off with substantial
savings in the long term, if it is successful. And thanks to the preliminary and subsequent measurements conducted by PerformanceGuard, the effect of the large investment was clear from day one.

After eight years of using the same supplier, the Region of South Denmark decided to insource the server hosting and maintenance of its electronic patient records (in Danish known as EPJ). The alternative was to conduct a complicated public procurement procedure. At the same time, the goal was to improve user experience, since to begin with, server
response times were too long, which resulted in too long waiting time for users in the healthcare industry. But even if the insourcing of hosting has been a resource-demanding job, it quickly turned out to be a good decision.

Region of South Denmark

“Quite specifically, our servers’ response time improved by 17 milliseconds per query. Even if it does not sound like much, it nevertheless quickly adds up when you have up to 21,000 employees across 13 hospitals and healthcare

units in the entire region who access the system multiple times a day. And this was no shot in the dark – we were able to measure, quite specifically, the improvement using PerformanceGuard,” says Henrik Lasota Gregersen, Functional Manager of IT Infrastructure of the Region of South Denmark.

“The Region’s server response time has actually dropped from around 950 to 230 hours daily. And this was no shot in the dark – we were able to measure, quite specifically, the improvement using PerformanceGuard.”

Henrik Lasota Gregersen

Funktional Manager of IT Infrastructur, The Region of South Denmark

720 working hours saved daily

The Region’s server response time has actually dropped from around 950 to 230 hours daily. This means that staff at the Region of South Denmark’s hospitals are waiting less for the system to respond. Actually much less: 720 working hours less on a daily basis.

A conclusion that has been drawn from actual user data collected from each individual computer in the entire region.

It was no arbitrary decision to have PerformanceGuard collect data locally from each individual computer. The link to individual devices namely ensures that the conclusions that are drawn about the performance of the IT systems reflect the reality experienced by doctors
and nurses at the hospitals.

 

“The setup with data collection from all of the Region’s computers can look a bit excessive. But it is a fact that if you try to set up a test that is not based on end-user experience and the equipment end users are actually working with, you run a very substantial risk of getting an entirely unusable result,” explains Claus Haugen, consultant at CapaSystems.

Performance measurements every day, all the time

Even if the measurements at the Region of South Denmark tell a really good story about downtime, PerformanceGuard also has another critical feature, namely troubleshooting.

The PerformanceGuard measurements run all the time. PerformanceGuard collects information about the performance of the IT systems every minute around the clock, and because the measurements are based on the users’ own devices, this gives the Region’s IT departments an opportunity to troubleshoot all the way down to each individual device when a user calls in with a problem: Is it a matter of a general problem that affects the server? Is there a disturbance at an individual department? Or does a computer simply needs to be replaced?

PerformanceGuard allows you to:

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analyze performance on the end user's computer - CPU and memory usage, disk I/O, boot and login times

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measure response times between the computer and the applications used by the user

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get an overview of the Citrix performance across the server farm

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continuously collect Windows Performance Counters

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make 24/7 monitoring of specific applications with automated user simulation

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gather everything on dashboards in real time

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Rikke Borup

Rikke Borup

Chief Marketing Officer