By Kelly Baig
@KellyEHB
Charles Mallio, or Charlie as we call him, is a long-time healthcare IT professional and friend to many of us working with MEDITECH hospitals. He currently serves as the Strategic Alliances Manager for Healthcare at NetApp. In this interview, Charlie shares his thoughts on the MEDITECH health IT world, the MEDITECH certified solution from NetApp, and what NetApp expects in the months to come.
Q. It’s been about a year since NetApp announced certification of its storage for MEDITECH, working with the BridgeHead Solution. What are some of the key trends that you see happening in MEDITECH hospitals that are adopting NetApp, such as at Children’s Hospital?
Charlie: One trend I see is the desire to reduce complexity. Healthcare IT has so much to deal with at the application layer; anything we can do to reduce complexity at the infrastructure layer is a real blessing to these hospitals. When MEDITECH certified NetApp storage a year ago, they took an important step in helping their customers reduce this complexity. CHCC (Children’s Hospital Central CA) is a great example. They were running their entire enterprise on NetApp storage, and they saw great efficiencies doing so. But because NetApp was not yet certified for MEDITECH, they couldn’t extend that investment: they were forced to maintain a separate, siloed infrastructure for MEDITECH. With certification, they’ve been able to consolidate their entire operation – including MEDITECH – on NetApp. This reduced a great deal of complexity for CHCC, which ultimately brings a real costs savings even beyond the reduction in their storage footprint that they were first able to achieve.
Q. I know that your own experience with MEDITECH stretches back at least a decade. What longer-term trends have you seen with MEDITECH hospitals that have affected their technology decisions?
Charlie: Next year will mark two decades for me working with MEDITECH hospitals. Staying with my theme of reducing complexity, we’re finally starting to see MEDITECH hospitals get more serious about the Cloud. Where not that many years ago they saw Cloud as a buzzword or the latest trend, now I think every MEDITECH customer is trying to figure out where Cloud fits for them. And Cloud doesn’t have to mean that someone else is running their infrastructure, although it certainly can mean that. What I’m seeing now is a philosophy that the hospital IT organization views itself as the Cloud provider to the rest of the organization. Call it a Private Cloud. NetApp supports this philosophy nicely. In fact, the FlexPod converged infrastructure that we offer with our partner Cisco is a leading platform for Cloud service providers worldwide, and MEDITECH hospitals are seeing the benefit of using FlexPod in their organizations. To date over 50% of MEDITECH customers running on NetApp run on FlexPod.
Q. That last fact is of interest, of course, because of our joint HealthStore for FlexPod solution, which extends data management beyond EMRs like MEDITECH to include DICOM and file data. It appears that a general theme here is choice, meaning that MEDITECH hospitals have a broader range of choice in their storage partners. What has the reaction to the NetApp solution been like?
Charlie: The reaction has been overwhelming, to say the least. When MEDITECH certified NetApp FAS storage last year, it was the first time in 12 years that they had certified a storage platform from a new storage partner. (And when I say “new”, I mean new as a partner to MEDITECH. NetApp is a Fortune 500 company that’s been in business for over 20 years.) While I’d like to take credit for that, it was really a groundswell of support from MEDITECH CIOs that led to our certification. So many MEDITECH customers were reaping the benefits of NetApp in their enterprise that they needed to be able to extend that investment to their MEDITECH infrastructure. To MEDITECH’s credit, they listened to their customers and allowed NetApp the opportunity to certify in the lab.
Q. Why did NetApp choose to work with BridgeHead to certify its solution for MEDITECH?
Charlie: BridgeHead was the obvious choice. When it comes to data protection for MEDITECH, no one has more experience than BridgeHead, but it’s more than that. As the Healthcare Data Management Company, BridgeHead has invested the time and resources to become experts in how to store, protect, and share clinical data. Partnering with BridgeHead gives us a broad solution that can be employed by all of our healthcare customers, not just the MEDITECH customers – such as with the HealthStore solution.
Q. What do you see coming up in the next year from NetApp that you think MEDITECH hospitals will find important?
Charlie: What I see over the next year is a strong adoption of NetApp storage running on our clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system. Clustered Data ONTAP uniquely offers the non-disruptive operations that hospitals demand. When customers tell me about the frustration they’ve suffered in the past with storage migrations – forklift upgrades, really – and I explain how clustered Data ONTAP can make that pain go away, you can see the excitement on their faces. As I said before, healthcare IT has enough things to worry about. Storage shouldn’t have to be one of them.
You can follow Charlie on Twitter, at: @CharlieONTAP
Follow NetApp for Healthcare, at: @NetAppHCare
