San Francisco nursing home turns to SaaS for network monitoring

The Jewish Home San Francisco, a skilled nursing facility for seniors, has a well-developed infrastructure, including a recently installed HealthMedx EMR, one in-house and one remote data center, a document imaging system and a financial management system, as well as the typical organizational email network. The infrastructure, built with products from numerous hardware and software vendors, serves about 950 employees. But the enterprise didn't have a comprehensive means of monitoring the networks for performance and to protect against outside threats.

After outgrowing various Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Solarwinds and some shareware utilities, Jewish Home, a not-for-profit that serves a large Medicare population, didn't have the financial resources to coordinate all its monitoring activities, nor could it afford the $100,000 or so it would take to build in redundancies. So the home became a beta site for Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor AccelOps, which has developed a software-as-a-service monitoring product with a short deployment time and enough security to meet HIPAA requirements.

"It came down to resources and cost," JHSF's IT director, Richard Navarro, says in an interview with FierceHealthIT. Navarro was hired last spring to help with the EMR implementation and to update other systems. Those projects strained the organization to the point that only an SaaS product was feasible for security monitoring, he says. "We didn't want to spend a lot of time configuring [the monitoring system] and babysitting it," Navarro adds.

The AccelOps service not only helps the organization keep tabs on network performance, but also allows Navarro and his staff zero in on problems with each system when they do occur. "Other things just say if a network device is up or down and gives a lot of false positives," Navarro says.

For background on the AccelOps product:
- click on this AccelOps press release

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