Cloud for good – delivering healthcare in the Arctic Circle

In my last post, I talked about the work Node Africa is doing to help connect farmers with new opportunities, including access to funding hitherto unavailable, by delivering a secure cloud infrastructure.

It’s all about cloud for good, something that is close to my heart. Technology can help companies do well, bringing commercial success, but it also has a role, as our CEO Pat Gelsinger put it, to do better and do good.

Node Africa is vital, important and beneficial to a huge number of people by giving them the tools to improve their situation. Working in sub-Saharan Africa has forced it to come up with unique solutions, powered by cloud. Yet even in countries with established infrastructure, providing critical services, such as healthcare, is not without its challenges. How, for example, can one of Norway’s most northerly regions ensure it receives quality healthcare despite its proximity to the Arctic Circle?

Getting ready for the future of health tech

Helse Nord is geographically the largest health authority in Norway. It runs 11 hospitals, serving approximately 480,000 inhabitants from Kirkenes in the east, close to the Russian border, out to the island of Svalbard, west of the Norwegian Sea. Employing more than 19,000 people, it is one of four health authorities in Norway, state-owned by the Department of Health.

Helse Nord IKT (ICT) is the main IT department for the entire region. It supports the hospitals and main hospital pharmacy whenever they require new functions, services, increased capacity and other needs. Previously its data center architecture was divided in three traditional divisions: networking, storage and compute, each working independent from another.

“That way of doing things led to very long delivery times for us. Let`s say we needed to expand our data center. We first had to place an order, and then wait for new parts to be delivered from somewhere in Europe. Then you had to install them physically into the specific on-premise data centers. After that, you somehow needed to make the three divisions coordinate with each other. That was difficult in a busy workday. It was not uncommon to wait several weeks for us to deliver what the organization needed,” says Vegard Jørgensen, Senior Advisor at Helse Nord IKT.

Scalability used to be painful for Helse Nord, easily taking two weeks if a hospital needed to expand its data center. Now, working with VMware has enabled the IT team to automate large parts of the supply chain, so it can deliver the same service in less than 30 minutes. Upgrading to vSphere enabled Helse Nord to deploy VMware vSAN to automate storage. Its data center now consists of between 800-1000 different services. Micro segmentation lets Jørgensen and his colleagues isolate each one from the other.

All employees within the organization use the services provided by Helse Nord IKT. This includes the email system, staff shift planning tools and a personnel portal for employee-related information. “The whole system is hybrid. Some services run in our on-premise private cloud on VMware NSX. Some run on the public cloud - our accounting system being one example. It is a highly scalable solution.” says Jørgensen.

This is exactly what cloud computing can do – help IT to enhance, rather than impede, with technology, and allow organisations to focus on their core goals.

Building a platform for the future

So far, we’ve looked at how cloud computing is supporting efforts to improve both people’s ability to make money and their access to healthcare. Next up is education – another critical element in improving the lives of people all over the world. I’ll be looking at how cloud can help connect teachers and students and enable increased learning opportunities, no matter where people are.