Central Maine Healthcare Improves Clinician Satisfaction with Cerner by Drastically Reducing Time to Remediation
“Every morning I have my coffee and Goliath which sets the stage for my day because the software is proactively monitoring Cerner & Citrix events, conditions, and failure points 24/7/365 that can cause end-user experience issues. Then, alerts me before users are impacted.”
Aaron Hilton, System Administrator at Central Maine Healthcare
The Challenge: Troubleshooting Citrix Performance Issues Exhausts IT Support
“I’ve received so many tickets where I would spend hours troubleshooting Cerner Millennium and other applications to try and find what was causing the latency when it was connection speed all along,” shares Aaron Hilton, a system administrator at Central Maine Healthcare system. Aaron is one of the main points of contact for resolving Citrix tickets, and the lack of visibility into the Citrix delivery infrastructure caused him to be reactive instead of proactive. “It took so much time to react to complaints that I didn’t have time or data to isolate the root cause and resolve the underlying issues that were actually causing the Citrix and Cerner performance issues.” Central Maine’s IT team needed a solution that would allow them to become proactive and reduce performance issues that were causing clinician frustration.
The Solution: End-to-End Visibility into Cerner & Citrix End-User Experience Improves Clinician Satisfaction
Goliath Technologies was selected by Central Maine Healthcare to give their IT team an end-to-end view from the initiation of a Cerner session, through the logon process and experience while using the Cerner Millennium application. All the data is presented based on what the user is experiencing. The traditional IT approach is to monitor the health of IT elements like networks, servers, storage, and the applications. This, however, offers no insights into how the IT delivery infrastructure is performing and one is left to infer that the end user is having a good experience. Unfortunately, the “inferred” experience isn’t actually the “actual” experience and so administrators are regularly surprised by complaints without the details necessary to solve the problem. Goliath approaches it from the end-user’s perspective and proactively identifies if there is slowness, for example, and then identifies the IT element causing the issue, as seen in the image below.
Aaron remarked, “Goliath has improved the credibility and reputation of the IT department due to the success with resolving clinician issues. In addition, other Cerner application support analysts are coming to me to get user experience data that Goliath collects.” Read on to learn about the ways Aaron and his team are making the most out of their solution.
Resolving “Citrix is Slow”
The very ambiguous “Citrix is slow” complaints have increased since the pandemic when their users went remote. With Goliath operational, Aaron and his team have been able to quickly determine if issues actually came from the Citrix or data center side, or if they were the result of the end-user’s behavior. In the image below, with just two mouse clicks the IT professional from Central Maine is able to drill all the way down into an end user’s session in real time when a ticket is opened. Here the IT professional is able to show that connection speed on their end is the cause of their performance issues.
In the past, the team handled persistent issues by holding a weekly committee to work together and try to remediate them. Now, with the use of Goliath’s technology, Aaron has become invaluable in his team as he has insights that not everyone else is able to see, and is even able to cut down the amount of time required for the meeting. Anyone could be in such a meeting and have a million assumptions of what the root cause is, Aaron tells us, and then everyone points their fingers to each other – “not my problem!” – puts their hands up, and passes the buck off to another team. But when you have proof of where the issue is in the Cerner delivery infrastructure, including visual representations, it gives the team responsible for those IT elements the information they need to quickly resolve the issue.
Conclusions:
Before adding in the Goliath solution, they only had time to do the bare minimum in support, which did not leave time to be proactive. Now that they have deeper insights into the root cause, they can solve issues quickly and have the documentation to put permanent fix actions into place. Goliath has changed them from being reactive to proactive.
Aaron summed up his experience with Goliath this way, “I recommend Goliath to any other Citrix admin that has never used this before. Once you use Goliath, it is going to be your go-to tool for sure. The software is so user friendly and has such detailed metrics that I can resolve sporadic end-user experience issues incredibly quickly and move on to fixing longer term issues.”