Troubleshooting Insights for Success Within your Epic Deployment

Read the latest blog from Theresa Miller (CTP, vExpert, MVP) where she explains how healthcare organizations using Epic can benefit from the broad and deep visibility provided by the Goliath Performance Monitor.

Healthcare organizations that deploy Epic to support the patients that they see every day have a responsibility to ensure that Epic is always online and performing well. Take for example, a hospital that uses Epic for all its patient services to keep the patients healthy and to ensure their safety Epic needs to be online 24×7. Monitoring and troubleshooting both the underlying infrastructure and Epic are critical to ensuring patients get the care they need. Today let’s talk about how to ensure this happens.

Visibility with native tools

Most Epic deployments are virtualized, as it is one of their recommended architecture options. End-user computing (EUC) products typically come with a nice set of native tools. Typically, I would recommend that organizations should try native tools for monitoring, but keep in mind that at the end of the day this will only take you far. In most hospital environments application architecture is complex, and a native tool will only show you a subset of the functionality. Most applications have layers of functionality that cannot be seen in their entirety with native tools. Because of this a, thousands of support tickets can be pouring in from end users, and, depending on the native tool the underlying root cause still be unknown, or worse, the simpler view of native tools may show all systems working properly. The reason is that native tools don’t always show the big picture, and the interdependencies between various systems are not monitored or visible.

Breaking down the silos

As we assess things further it becomes clearer that EUC virtual environments in general have many layers to be monitored. These environments have storage, network, infrastructure and application software. Not only can you end up with multiple native monitor tools, there can be corresponding team silos to work through in the enterprise. During any critical outage impacting Epic working through team silos can add a challenging dynamic. Teams need to communicate with each other openly to figure out the problem. The more team silos, the longer it can take to resolve a problem. The longer the problem goes unsolved the more patient impact to care that will be seen. Having one monitoring tool that can see into the entire architecture will lead to the ability to having more proactive response teams, and faster time to resolution of issues that cannot proactively be prevented.

Time to get proactive and say goodbye to reactive

Now that we’ve looked at the challenges with troubleshooting infrastructure that supports your Epic environment it’s time to evaluate further. Goliath Technologies has a module for their Performance Monitor solution that can not only monitor and troubleshoot your entire virtual infrastructure; it can also integrate data directly from Epic, providing the ability to correlate between the key metrics that Epic System Pulse can provide.

Why is this important you ask?

When it comes to Epic performance there are many different aspects of your underlying architecture that can impact access to the application, user logon speed, and system latency. These potential problems can lead to end-user frustration if a wholistic view of the overall environment isn’t at your fingertips.

Healthcare IT benefits from the broad and deep visibility from Goliath in several ways. First, it provides a wholistic view of end user experience issues across the complex environments that is unavailable to native tools. Secondly, many customers use it as a starting point to quickly identify if the root cause of a specific issue is in Epic, or in the underlying delivery architecture, and troubleshoot accordingly. With Goliath’s module for Epic System Pulse Integration, it is easy to diagnose problems both proactively and in an expedited fashion ensuring business functionality, uptime, and proactive problem solving. Having a solution that is purpose-built, your IT support organization can ensure Epic uptime and business success.