Resolves a Patient Application Issue in Hours not Days or Weeks

“We received an urgent request from a Chief Nursing Officer at one of our hospitals. She reported that nursing staff were not receiving important patient information from a staffing application. The application vendor couldn’t pinpoint root cause. We called Goliath and within 3 hours the UHS internal IT team and Goliath Professional Services were able to resolve the issue.”— Justin Monnig, General Manager of Crossings Healthcare Solutions, a subsidiary of Universal Health Services, Inc.

Infrastructure

Oracle Health & Cerner Millennium 

Challenge

User Accounts Mysteriously Disappearing

Universal Health Services, Inc. (UHS) was experiencing user accounts in the nursing staffing application mysteriously disappearing from groups, impacting the ability for the appropriate staff to receive important messages. It was both troubling and puzzling for the IT team. Below are the action steps the IT team and Goliath Troubleshooting Services Team took to troubleshoot the user account problem and prevent the failure to deliver healthcare services from recurring in the future. 

Solution

Finding the Root Cause in Hours– Not Days

This issue was affecting the delivery of patient care, and finding a resolution was time critical. Unfortunately, the vendor support channel for diagnosing and resolving this issue was proving to be ineffective. The ticket was escalated to the application vendor and the UHS team awaited a response. Simultaneously, however, they also engaged Goliath Troubleshooting Services and their internal Citrix monitoring, escalation & engineering team to see if they could resolve it more quickly. 

“I contacted Goliath since I knew Goliath Troubleshooting Services would be able to help from past experience with their team. They wrote a quick SQL query to gather application process information and set up proactive alerting as well as an additional report to provide the needed information. These findings were sent to the hospital and they were able to use the information to prove that this was an end user issue and not a result of the application. So we were able to troubleshoot, identify the root cause and resolve the issue in less than 3 hours from first call to final resolution. All this before we heard from the application provider.” 

The image above displays metrics from a single user session which helps quickly identify if the root cause of slow performance is isolated to a single user due to behavior or if it is a larger systematic issue related to the underlying infrastructure (Citrix) or application. In this example, it identifies that a slow connection speed (potentially from home WiFi) was causing the end user performance issues, not the application itself. 

Results

By leveraging Goliath’s Troubleshooting Services Team, the team at UHS solved a mission-critical issue that could have impacted patient care.  

Now, UHS has proactive monitoring and alerting set for this specific condition so that, if it ever happens again at other hospitals, they will be alerted in real-time. 

UHS currently has Goliath Citrix Monitoring technology deployed throughout their entire Citrix application delivery infrastructure, which they use to deliver Cerner Millennium™ to their hospitals. The scope of their deployment includes agents deployed within the Cerner-hosted datacenter, and the Goliath Application Availability Monitor at over 33 acute care hospital facilities across the United States. The technology is used by UHS for Citrix monitoring to anticipate, troubleshoot, resolve and, most importantly, prevent issues with accessing Cerner Millennium™ from impacting users’ ability to deliver healthcare services.