Technology plays an essential role at St. Joseph’s Health in New Jersey, from supporting electronic health records and lab tests to email and administration. The IT infrastructure must be available around the clock – just like the doctors, nurses and support staff who rely on it.
Jesse Fasolo has an important responsibility. When aging storage impacted hospital operations, Fasolo, the Director of Technology and Information Security, turned to Pure Storage for dramatically faster performance. In the process, he set the stage for a more data-driven healthcare organization, supporting initiatives such as AI-powered analytics and the cloud.
Losing sleep over storage performance
When Fasolo joined St. Joseph’s Health, the IT organization was under new leadership and looking to leverage technology in service of healthcare excellence. It was Fasolo’s job to create a future-ready IT foundation – helping clinicians and staff work more efficiently while paving the way for future initiatives in the cloud and AI.
Storage was a critical piece of the puzzle. At the time, the legacy implementation caused headaches for IT and frustration for clinicians – with poor performance, slow backups and frequent downtime.
“We battled fires every day just to keep systems running,” Fasolo remembers. “Something as simple as a mass email with a PDF could cut into performance, keeping patients waiting to be admitted or doctors waiting for lab results.”
That kept Fasolo up at night. “I would sleep with my phone on my chest, worrying about what might happen,” he says.
A solid investment in storage improves staff results
“Out of all the competitors, Pure Storage had the right technology to take us into the future. And it was something I wouldn’t have to turn around and replace right away,” he says. “Plus, Pure helped me develop a strategic plan – other vendors just wanted to sell me a box.”
The solution from Pure boosts the performance and reliability for clinical applications, email, analytics, Citrix VDI and more. The solution enables daily backups and snapshots every 15 minutes, with zero impact on crucial systems. Email backups take two hours instead of four days. If there is an outage in one data center, systems continue to run seamlessly. The redundancy across multiple locations creates a true active – active virtual solution. And login times for users have gone from minutes to seconds.
“In healthcare, every second counts,” says Fasolo. “With Pure Storage, we’re saving clinicians and those who support them a lot of time over the course of a day so they can focus on delivering the best patient care.”
Cloud-ready storage foundation brings health and longevity
With Pure, Fasolo can start moving workloads to the cloud – a cost-effective way to archive data for compliance purposes. The technology also allows St. Joseph’s to start using the AI-driven analytics capabilities within some of its clinical applications, helping to bring patient care to new levels.
“With Pure Storage, I’m now in the position to say ‘yes, we can support that’ to just about anything the organization requires,” Jesse says.
