Lehigh Valley Health Network | End-to-End Performance Management Customers

Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN), located in eastern Pennsylvania, has been noted as one of ‘America’s Best Hospitals’ in US News & World Report Magazine for the past thirteen years. Their 9,500 employees are committed to teamwork and understand the value of technology in providing superb patient care. LVHN is the first health system in the country to adopt a ‘continuous improvement’ initiative.

Lehigh Valley Health Network Utilizes AppResponse, AppTransaction, and AppInternals for End-To-End Application Performance Management

Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN), located in eastern Pennsylvania, has been noted as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” in US News and World Report Magazine for the past thirteen years. Their 9,500 employees are committed to teamwork and understand the value of technology in providing superb patient care. LVHN is the first health system in the country to adopt a “continuous improvement” initiative.

Challenge

The mission of the Information Systems (I/S) department is to create a digital health network to support the continuous improvement initiative and enhance patient care. In the last ten years, LVHN implemented a digital electronic medical records system, a computer physician order entry application, and bar code technology that matches patients with prescription medication over its wireless network. The I/S department is expected to ensure 100% network availability to deliver these critical applications.

Solution

• AppResponse
• Transaction Analyzer
• AppInternals

LVHN turned to Riverbed NPM to support its mission and “do more with less.” Prior to Riverbed NPM, the time to capture and analyze a packet trace and report on the cause of application delays typically took an entire day. During an initial product demonstration, LVHN immediately recognized the potential of Riverbed Transaction Analyzer software to greatly accelerate troubleshooting and purchased the product the very next day.

Richard Fronheiser, I/S Manager states, “Now I am able to determine the root-cause of poor performance and generate an automated diagnostic report in about 30 minutes. My staff has realized a 70% reduction in troubleshooting time with Transaction Analyzer.”

LVHN then decided to replace its existing network monitoring software and purchase Riverbed AppResponse Appliance for real-time end-user experience and application performance monitoring.

LVHN installed AppResponse appliances at the data center, at the helpdesk, and at each of its three hospitals to gain visibility across the entire network. AppResponse enables the I/S team to find problems very quickly—often before end-users are affected. AppResponse historical data and rich metrics enable Fronheiser and his team to analyze past network and application behavior. Actionable reporting and detailed metrics enabled them to justify the AppResponse investment to management.

Benefits

“AppResponse and Transaction Analyzer solve about 90% of the performance problems that we are seeing,” states Fronheiser. LVHN recently acquired Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals software to monitor and troubleshoot application performance at the component level.

AppInternals provides visibility into system and database performance, along with method-level visibility into application code, enabling rapid root-cause analysis of issues that originate within the server tier.

LVHN plans to implement AppInternals to monitor and rapidly troubleshoot application and database performance for five critical applications.

“SteelCentral provides end-to-end visibility into application performance from both the network and the application perspective. With any task, you need the right tool to get the job done quickly and efficiently and we have found the right tools with AppResponse, Transaction Analyzer, and AppInternals. We continue to purchase solutions from Riverbed because of their integrated APM approach and their focus on customer feedback.”