IDERA Helps St. Charles Do More with Less

OVERVIEW

St. Charles Health System began in 2001 as Cascade Health Services when St. Charles Medical Center in Bend merged with Central Oregon District Hospital in Redmond. With four hospitals and more than 120 employed medical providers, St. Charles Health System is the largest provider of medical care in Central Oregon. The health system takes its role in its communities seriously and has pledged to work with its partners to achieve its vision: Creating America’s healthiest community, together.

The St. Charles Health System employs approximately 3,400 employees in Bend, Redmond, Madras and Prineville, OR. The systems database infrastructure includes 1100 SQL Server databases being managed by three full time database administrators (DBAs). The role of the DBA organization is to provide best practices for SQL Server administration, hosting, build, maintain and administer SQL Server as a service and provide troubleshooting of database related problems.

THE CHALLENGE

Today’s health care is very much data driven and monitoring and maintaining that data are critical to every healthcare system.
With 70% growth each year in healthcare data, healthcare organizations are spending more and more for either downtime or poor performance of their databases servers.

Poor visibility, in real-time, into the health of database servers and working reactively instead of proactively are main contributors to that cost.

Like many modern healthcare systems, St. Charles Healthcare relies on its SQL Servers to support business critical applications for its EHR (Electronic health record) and EMR (Electronic medical record) systems.

With an ever changing database environment and a growing healthcare system, St. Charles Health System faced challenges with a lack of monitoring of SQL Server instances; database downtimes causing issues, expansion of SQL Server install base and no enterprise alerting system. This all took place while the organization had no trained DBAs on staff.