Goliath Services Team Prevents Cerner & Citrix Performance Issues from Impacting Clinicians

“Goliath Technologies’ gives us complete visibility into the end-user experience from the time they logon to Cerner through their use of the application, in real-time, so we stay ahead of performance issues that can impact our users.” – Chris Timbers, CIO at NorthBay Healthcare 

Infrastructure

Cerner Millennium, Citrix

Challenge

This story speaks to unique challenges that NorthBay faced and how the Goliath Troubleshooting Services team was able to apply technology and expertise to resolve Cerner Millennium or Citrix logon issues before physicians or clinicians were impacted.

IT Challenges with Cerner Millennium & Citrix that Impact Patient Care

NorthBay IT was faced with the following daily challenges:

Slow logons for Cerner and Citrix: Physicians log on from different locations throughout the hospital and see patients every 20 minutes, so a two-minute delay when trying to access Cerner is too long to wait. Speed of access to these applications is critical to ensuring that time is spent providing healthcare service and not waiting for application sessions to launch.

Delayed identification of Cerner or Citrix performance degradation: Degraded session performance severely impacts the timely delivery of patient care. As a result, it is critical that performance “slowdowns” are identifiedearly, before the ability to deliver services is impacted [Learn more about Goliath Performance Monitor for Hospitals Using Cerner].

Complexity of the Cerner and Citrix Logon Process:The Cerner and Citrix logon process is the primary step to accessing mission-critical applications. It is complex and relies on many components to successfully complete the logon process, making it difficult to troubleshoot without purpose-built technology.

Lack of Visibility: NorthBay healthcare providers primarily utilize the Cerner application via Citrix. This application is hosted by Cerner. NorthBay had visibility into their own infrastructure while Cerner actively monitored application performance in the data center. However, there was no effective end-to-end performance monitoring from the data center to the desktop.

Solution

Goliath Troubleshooting Services 

After an exhaustive search to identify a solution for NorthBay’s unique visibility challenges, their team elected to deploy Goliath Performance Monitor and Goliath Application Availability Monitor with out-of-the-box functionality to support Citrix and Cerner.

Implementing Goliath Performance Monitor in just the NorthBay environment was not going to be sufficient in providing the end-to-end visibility that they required. However, because Goliath is the only monitoring technology allowed in the Cerner hosted facility, we were able to provide an industry-only fully integrated solution that encompasses their entire application delivery architecture. Goliath Performance Monitor offered the following capabilities to the administrators and support staff at NorthBay: 

• End-to-end visibility that enables them to have performance and availability metrics from the end-users’ perspective at the hospital location. This data can be trended in real-time and historically.
• Visibility into both on-premise and Cerner-hosted applications and servers.

Results

Once the product was deployed, NorthBay system administrators had true end-to-end visibility with comprehensive monitoring of both Cerner Millennium and Citrix. They received an in-depth view into the entire user workflow, regardless of location. Goliath’s Cerner and Citrix monitoring capabilities, combined with Cerner’s remote hosting technologies and services, provide NorthBay with advanced warning of potential end-user experience issues and evidence of root cause to resolve and prevent future issues. 

To increase visibility across the network, NorthBay also wanted to guarantee that clinical applications would launch when physicians and healthcare workers attempted to log on. Healthcare workers see patients about every 20 minutes, so the applications needed to launch immediately to avoid scheduling delays. Goliath Application Availability Monitor was deployed to proactively log on to applications and alert IT administrators of logon failures or slowness before end users were impacted.

The advantage of having the Goliath solution deployed on-premises, where clinical applications are hosted, is that NorthBay now has complete end-to-end visibility that previously could not have been accomplished. In addition, NorthBay can complement the quality monitoring and management that CernerWorks provides in the hosted facility with their own on-site end-user experience monitoring and management.