Hospital Alemán celebrates more than a decade of data-protection success with Veeam

The healthcare sector is moving fast, with new breakthroughs in diagnostics and treatments emerging all the time. Many of these advances are being driven by leaps forward in the technology used to assess and monitor patients. As a result, data availability is becoming more crucial than ever for innovative healthcare organizations such as Hospital Alemán.

“At Hospital Alemán, patient experiences are our number one priority,” said Ezequiel Méndez, Assistant Technology Manager at Hospital Alemán. “We’re aiming high; we recently unveiled the most technologically advanced operating theaters in Latin America. We’ve launched programs aimed at cutting wait times and boosting efficiency, among other goals. Our services are becoming increasingly data-driven, which makes the IT team’s role even more essential to patient welfare.”

The IT skills that Hospital Alemán relies on to keep critical technology running smoothly are in short supply. Consequently, the organization is always on the lookout for tools that can reduce pressure on the IT team without reducing quality.

“Like every industry, we’re seeing an IT skills gap in which finding and retaining the right talent to achieve our digital transformation goals can be a challenge,” said Méndez. “One of our strategies is to lighten the administrative burden on these individuals wherever we can. That allows them to focus on higher-value IT tasks that contribute directly to the hospital’s core objectives.”

Hospital Alemán saw an opportunity to leverage automation to enhance its data protection capabilities while reducing management effort. The organization looked for the right solution to realize its goal.

Hospital Alemán selected Veeam to protect its vital healthcare data. The organization first deployed Veeam when it moved its digital services to a new IT infrastructure with a disaster recovery (DR) configuration.

“Ever since we built a DR site, Veeam has been our solution of choice to manage data backup and replication,” said Méndez. “We evaluated offerings from other vendors, but Veeam outshone them, particularly because of its tight integration with VMware and simple management capabilities.”

In addition to the off-site backup at its second data center, Hospital Alemán now uses Veeam to back up data to a local cloud provider based in Argentina. The organization relies on Veeam to safeguard critical applications including its electronic health record system, medical imaging software and the Hospital Alemán patient portal.

“Every step of the way, Veeam has enabled our DR strategy,” said Méndez. “Our clinicians need rapid access to patient data to diagnose and treat patients effectively. Any downtime to our medical imaging systems translates into longer wait times for patients, which isn’t acceptable to us. By boosting the availability of systems and resources, Veeam allows our clinicians to maximize the time they spend interacting with patients, enabling far greater care experiences.”

As Veeam releases new features and functionalities, Hospital Alemán takes advantage of them to increase both IT resilience and efficiency. For example, the organization has introduced immutable backups to help secure its data against cyber-criminals.

“The Veeam roadmap is evolving alongside ours,” said Méndez. “With cyber-attacks becoming increasingly common, it’s vital that we have a reliable tool for data backup and restore — with Veeam, we know that we’re covered, which means our patients are protected too. We also have tools such as Fast Clone at our fingertips to help us work faster and smarter.”

Thanks to the time saved in managing backups, Hospital Aleman's IT team is now able to implement new and exciting initiatives whilst remaining at the forefront of the healthcare sector in Latin America.

“Innovation is embedded in Hospital Alemán’s DNA,” said Méndez. “It’s what allows us to keep improving the patient experience. Veeam is so simple to use and so powerful that it enables our IT team to work to their full potential, helping us bring leading-edge healthcare to Buenos Aires.”

• Zero significant incidents in the last 12 years, supporting superior patient experiences.
  Since deploying Veeam, Hospital Alemán has not experienced any issues with the solution and has used the technology to recover fast from events affecting its IT environment, enabling stellar continuity of service.
• Reduces the number of employees dedicated to managing backups from three to two (with one as a contingency).
  Helps Hospital Alemán reduce its reliance on specialist IT skills and make better use of scarce resources, enabling savings that can be passed onto patients in the form of  a healthcare service that’s both better quality and faster.
• Allows the IT team to restore files or emails in seconds rather than entire servers in hours, decreasing patient wait times.
  “Before Veeam, our medical imaging system went down and it took almost a day to bring it back up,” said Méndez. “With Veeam, we know we’d be able to recover from a similar incident in just minutes, insulating our patients from disruption.”