VMware Helps St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers Enhance Patient Care, Streamline Operations

Renowned Healthcare System Virtualizes 85 Percent of Infrastructure in 90 Days; Expects to Save $3.4 Million in Move to All-Digital, All-Green Infrastructure

PALO ALTO, Calif. – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers of New York City has deployed VMware’s industry-leading management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, to provide a reliable, flexible and cost-effective platform for clinical and administrative applications as well as St. Vincent’s test and development environment.

St. Vincent is one of New York’s most respected healthcare providers. The St. Vincent system treats nearly 150,000 patients each year and is anchored by St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, which also serves as the academic medical center for New York Medical College. The St. Vincent system recently underwent a financial and operational restructuring that provided the organization with an opportunity to reengineer its IT infrastructure. As a result, St. Vincent adopted a virtualization strategy to improve the performance and availability of mission-critical applications, accelerate the rollout of new systems, reduce capital and operating costs, and provide St. Vincent with the flexibility to evolve along with the healthcare industry in the years ahead.

“Over the course of just a few months, the VMware platform helped St. Vincent move into the 21st century and improve the healthcare experience for our patients while delivering tremendous ROI,” said Tony Antinori, vice president of technology, communications and operations at St. Vincent. “In our emergency department, for example, we’ve increased the availability of essential applications. In turn, that has increased the number of documents we can process 100-fold. That means we can treat many more patients in less time. We’ve accomplished this while reducing our expected hardware, power and cooling costs by $3.4 million over the next three years, which is helping us maintain solid financial footing.”

Nearly 85 percent of St. Vincent’s production environment has been virtualized, including clinical, emergency and pharmacy applications as well as business and administrative applications from Cerner, Blood bank, GE, and PatientKeeper, to name a few. St. Vincent’s entire pre-production environment is also virtualized. The next major virtualization project is a scheduled desktop replacement of St. Vincent’s traditional PCs with thin clients and VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Currently St. Vincent’s has deployed zero foot print clients to their emergency department in conjunction with VMware VDI technology to work around some WAN latency issues and has boosted employee performance in the emergency department instantaneously. Both the datacenter and desktop virtualization efforts are part of St. Vincent’s larger strategic plan to have an all-digital, all-green IT infrastructure.

After making the decision to go virtual, St. Vincent considered offerings from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. Ultimately, the selection was based on VMware’s ability to provide a comprehensive solution and broad toolset rather than point products or a standalone hypervisor. VMware’s complete solution includes centralized management via VirtualCenter, high availability thanks to unique features such as Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMotionTM, and innovative memory management that have made application performance in the virtual environment superior to performance in St. Vincent’s old hardware-based environment.

“VMware has had a positive impact on nearly every aspect of our operations,” said Kane Edupuganti, director of IT operations and communications at St. Vincent. “For instance, we were on the verge of having to move our entire datacenter. The VMware platform instantly allowed us to shrink the datacenter footprint and get ready for the move, though we did not go forward with the move. We have a consolidation ratio of 35 virtual machines to each physical host which has also allowed us to maintain a small footprint in our datacenter if the need ever arises to move in the future. Virtualization has also provided us an instant hardware refresh for all our old servers in the datacenter. IT is now seen as a strategic enabler, not simply a cost center. The flexibility of our virtual infrastructure is helping to improve everything from regulatory compliance to our ability to innovate. VMware has been a big win for St. Vincent and our patients.”