The Vinzenz von Paul Kliniken gGmbH incorporates three medical facilities in the Stuttgart area. The Marienhospital Stuttgart alone counts around 800 beds and 2000 employees.
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Part of a catholic parent organization, the Vinzenz von Paul Kliniken is subject to stricter data protection laws than the general German ones. However, the hospital’s clinical staff often used DropBox or GoogleDrive to share files with external parties. Doctors collaborate on medical articles, contribute conference content, and sometimes even co-author books. They did not realize that as soon as they shared their files in the cloud, the intellectual property (IP) rights for it could be transferred to the cloud provider, a huge issue when so much original content is shared.
The hospital also wanted to find an alternative to hosting regular health and safety briefings. All staff needed to attend these two hour sessions in person. The hospital wanted to introduce an option to complete the training at a time of the participant’s choosing; such as during some down-time in an on-call shift which would be a much more productive use of their time.
Mr Simon Holder, IT Infrastructure Manager at the Vinzenz von Paul Kliniken, explains a final consideration: “We are long-time GroupWise users. Our email system, serving 2,000 users, has now grown to 2TB which means backup and disaster recovery take a long time. We wanted to reduce this, while adhering to the strict data protection laws.”
Tackling the pressing issue of unsecure file sharing, the hospital engaged implementation partner Bechtle to find an on premise solution which would integrate well with its infrastructure. Bechtle specializes in sustainable IT architectures and implementation and, with its strong history in Micro Focus technology, Filr was soon identified as the best candidate. Mr Stephan Köhnlein from Bechtle explains the process: “Filr is a very easy product to install and manage; within three days it was configured and integrated into the hospital’s complex IT infrastructure. The on premise benefit was very clear and the drag-and-drop features and consumer-focused interface meant nearly 200 users were soon up and running with it."
Attention was then turned to creating an online portal for interactive information sharing which could replace time-consuming and expensive meetings. Micro Focus Vibe was used to host health and safety training in an eLearning environment. The team soon realized Vibe had the potential to do much more, as Mr. Holder comments: “The interactive Vibe environment lends itself perfectly for online recertification. All our staff undergo regular recertification and this is now all managed automatically through a Vibe workflow; from studying the materials through to taking the test and receiving the results.”
Vibe is also used to ease growing inner-city traffic congestion and parking problems. Staff often had difficulty finding a nearby parking spot and the hospital has a corporate directive to reduce its carbon footprint. Using Vibe, an online car sharing scheme has been introduced so that staff can offer or ask for lifts. Through the clear layout it is easy to find a match and arrange a ride, easing traffic and parking issues for all, while reducing emissions.
Micro Focus was the obvious email backup and archiving solution for the hospital’s 2,000 GroupWise® users. Micro Focus GroupWise Disaster Recovery is the fastest backup and disaster recovery available for GroupWise and Micro Focus Retain™ manages a central email archive with the flexibility to quickly respond to new tax regulations. The combination of GroupWise Disaster Recovery and Retain means that all mail older than a year is automatically deleted from the production system but remains easily searchable from the archive. This is predicted to halve the mail system size from 2TB to 1TB, drastically reducing the backup and disaster recovery time while ensuring compliance with data retention and archiving mandates.
New use cases for Micro Focus technology are emerging, as Mr. Holder comments: “We use Filr to collaborate with small medical practices who outsource their laboratory testing to us. Without opening up our central medical information system, we can still safely and quickly share test results. We can see lots of potential for Vibe too, with requests to add project team Wikis and standard operating procedures for our surgeons.”
He concludes: “The Micro Focus technology fits perfectly in our environment and the license structure made it a cost effective solution for us with many added benefits, like supporting our environmental objectives. Bechtle has been a real value-add partner for us during this process.”
