As Tokyo’s oldest hospital, Makita General Hospital has been the hub of local medical care in Tokyo for decades, boasting a wide range of specialist departments and serving over 700 outpatients a day. However, having been housed in the original building since 1942, the hospital’s technology infrastructure had aged: medical and patient records were housed in an electronic medical record system built on a cumbersome three-tier architecture of servers, SANs, and storage.
This inefficient system created a heavy resource burden, in terms of working hours, physical space, air conditioning costs, and frequent system updates. Patients experienced long waiting times for their records, in turn creating higher default rates and a wastage of clinic slots and resources. Medical staff, including nurses and doctors, spent time clearing backlogs of administrative work, adding stress to an already difficult job.
Renewing tech infrastructure as part of an overall rejuvenation
Early in 2021, Makita General Hospital relocated to a new hospital building in Makata, Tokyo. The management team aimed to leverage the relocation to rebrand from an old medical institution to a modern healthcare provider offering better care for its patients and a better working environment for its staff. They also seized the opportunity to revamp its electronic medical record system. The goal was a complete overhaul of its physical architecture and digital infrastructure.
In renewing both its software and hardware, the hospital wanted its new system to be more user-friendly, cost effective, and scalable. The hospital therefore deployed Lenovo’s ThinkAgile HX series Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) products as its server platform.
Lenovo infrastructure, devices and services help improve both patient and employee satisfaction
The new electronic medical record system was introduced to a different server platform – Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) from the ThinkAgile HX Series. This increased productivity as employees could now log in to the medical record system and retrieve patient information very quickly, without waiting for the IT help desk to fix device issues. The ThinkAgile HX Series also enabled the hospital’s platform to be fully integrated with flexible expandability for future system enhancements.
The replacement of its old servers with HCI drastically reduced the number of servers and by extension, decreased maintenance and equipment costs. The long hours that staff had to dedicate in clearing their administrative backlogs was significantly reduced. Moreover, the hospital procured a new fleet of ThinkPads for its in-house IT staff, enabling them to centrally manage the delivery schedule for the mass introduction of servers and PCs. Since the maintenance contact was centralized at Lenovo, maintenance-related operations were simplified and led to a further reduction in working hours.
In addition to introducing HCI for the first time, the hospital had to migrate the old electronic medical record system to a virtual machine without damaging the data. Having faced several technical difficulties in migrating the systems, the hospital decided to deploy Lenovo’s professional services for assistance – where a team of Lenovo consultants, engineers, and project managers leveraged their extensive expertise from similar projects at other hospitals to ensure the migration was a smooth process, thereby ensuring that sensitive patient data is kept secure and intact.
Since deploying Lenovo’s server, PCs and services solutions, Makita General Hospital has registered higher patient satisfaction rates and a marked decrease in administrative workload for doctors and nurses. With a refreshed IT system in place, Makita General Hospital truly turned the page at its new home in empowering its nurses, doctors and staff to focus on serving patients better.