The Criticality of Reliability

VNSNY knew that building a reliable network was just as important as building a functional one. In a clinical setting, there simply isn’t room for extended periods of downtime or lost messages. “We can’t afford to wait until someone tells us they can’t find their data,” says Jacobson. “And when we originally developed this system, we didn’t have the visibility into where our messages were if they were stuck in queue or not completed.”

So to ensure the network functioned reliably and gain a deeper visibility into the message flow, VNSNY decided to implement a monitoring solution. “We realized we needed to track messages and know where they are,” says Jacobson. “When someone doesn’t get their message, we need to be able to quickly identify the reason and find out where it is and why it may have been hung up.”

After reviewing several vendors in the market, VNSNY selected Avada Software and implemented Avada’s Infrared360® messaging and monitoring solution. According to Jacobson, this WebSphere-approved solution proactively identifies issues that lead to lost or misrouted transactions and provides the monitoring and alerting capabilities that are required to ensure its messaging network is reliable and efficient. “We wanted to know when things were not working properly, and with this solution, we get alerts when queue managers and/or MQ channels are down and queues are filling up or part of the network is at risk,” says Jacobson. “And we can act on them before they affect our nurses.”

Night and Day
With the current network in place, the nurses at VNSNY are more efficient in delivering care to their patients. They can visit more patients each day and spend less time on administrative work and data entry. Jacobson says the recent move to a single sign-on for both the company’s intranet and the IBM AIX system has streamlined the submission of data even further and made it even easier for the nurses to do their jobs. “When you’re talking about thousands of very busy visiting nurses out in the field, the amount of time we spent resetting passwords was significant,” says Jacobson. “These are nurses, not technical people, so we really tried to make the IT side of their job as easy as possible out in the field, so they can focus on caring for their patients. Our bottom line is patient care. Our patients are in their homes and by leveraging this mobile technology and this network, we are able to deliver them the care they need in the setting that works best for them. And that is the whole purpose of what we do here.”