Delivering critical medical and healthcare intervention

The challenge

Leading-edge facility needed to protect critical data and systems 

Floyd Medical Center, the flagship hospital of the Atrium Health Floyd, is a 304-bed acute care hospital and regional referral center with more than 40 medical specialties. To provide its patients with exceptional care, Floyd relies on the availability, performance and security of its IT systems. Floyd developed a multi-year strategy to significantly improve its disaster recovery capabilities and its core data center.

“Our strategy was to partner with a state-of-the-art data center for our DR needs and then grow that relationship and our footprint with that organization when our lease came up on our primary site,” explained Jeff Buda, vice president and chief information officer at Floyd Medical Center. Floyd met with Flexential and was impressed by its leading-edge facilities, the expertise of its internal team and the overall level of trust developed during the vetting process. After evaluating multiple providers, Floyd chose the Flexential Atlanta – Alpharetta facility for its DR needs.

The solution

Redundant, secure facilities provide a stable, compliant environment 

Floyd deployed this DR environment, achieving the stability, availability and security needed to minimize data loss, support its IT systems and allow the medical facility to continue to operate should an unexpected event impact its primary data center.

When the contract at its primary data center expired, Floyd moved out of this site and established Flexential Atlanta – Alpharetta as its production facility. The medical provider also expanded its relationship with Flexential as planned, introducing the Flexential Nashville – Franklin location as its DR site.

In this updated, highly redundant scenario, Flexential hosts Floyd’s financial, administrative and clinical applications, including its patient registration and logistics systems, and its EMR system which supports 50 primary care practices.

Flexential’s pair of data centers offer the robust solution Floyd needed to support its healthcare practices. The redundant power and cooling built into the environments promote uptime to meet the strict compliance demands of healthcare. Additionally, the data centers offer more than 1,500 watts per square foot to power Floyd’s most intensive and essential customer-impacting applications.

Offering diverse connectivity options and a 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) network backbone—scalable to 400 Gbps—Flexential optimizes performance and reliability, allowing Floyd to minimize latency issues that could impact patient care. Its power, cooling and networking are also backed by a 100% SLA to foster a high level of confidence in its ability to deliver an effective IT solution.

The data centers’ robust security features, including dual-factor authentication access, biometric scanners, multi-zone security access and monitored security cameras and intercom system, further safeguard Floyd’s systems and its sensitive data. The data center’s audit-ready environments also help Floyd adhere to key regulations and industry standards, including HIPAA and PCI DSS.

The results

Remaining focused on patient care

In the midst of its data center migrations, Floyd admitted the first COVID-19 patient in Georgia. To prepare for a projected surge in cases, the medical center’s internal IT team built out a series of spaces, taking over two floors of a building that adjoined the main hospital, converting half of a parking deck into a 100-bed field hospital and converting shipping containers into a mobile, 20-bed hospital unit with a nursing station and nursing unit. Each new site was built out with networking, telephony and data. Flexential enabled Floyd to securely access patient data and critical IT systems from these new locations to continue to deliver outstanding patient care.

As Floyd’s internal IT team worked feverishly to complete these builds and deploy the necessary infrastructure, Flexential managed the data center migrations, ensuring the process went smoothly with no unplanned service outages or unexpected events. This was particularly crucial given the high-pressure, unprecedented situation.

During this time, Flexential also supported a dramatic increase in telemedicine. Prior to COVID-19, none of Floyd’s primary care offices used this virtual application. When the pandemic hit, these offices wanted this capability immediately to maintain their practices, promote safety and social distancing, and conserve PPE. Floyd’s IT team stood up a purpose-built telemedicine platform within a couple weeks, allowing its primary care providers to conduct nearly 2,800 virtual visits between March and May 2020. Flexential was key to enabling this shift, providing seamless and instant access to Floyd’s data.

While Floyd concentrated on deploying this new COVID-ready environment, the organization leaned heavily on Flexential to support its data center migrations which were occurring simultaneously. Flexential supported Floyd through the height of the pandemic, and continues to meet Floyd’s needs, serving as an extension of the healthcare provider’s IT department and allowing it to remain focused on its core business of managing patient health.

This level of support provided Floyd with a tremendous level of confidence in the responsiveness and dependability of the Flexential team during a taxing time.