Transcript of a discussion on how two Belgian hospitals are adjusting to dynamic healthcare economics by leveraging the multilevel benefits of composable infrastructure and pay-as-you-go buying options for data centers.

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A Tale of Two Hospitals—How Dynamic
Healthcare Economics in Belgium
Hastens Need for Modern IT Efficiency
Transcript of a discussion on how two Belgian hospitals are adjusting to dynamic healthcare
economics by leveraging the multilevel benefits of composable infrastructure and pay-as-you-go
buying options for data centers.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the
Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with
us now as we learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.
Our next data center agility interview explores how two Belgian hospitals are adjusting to
dynamic healthcare economics to better compete and cooperate. We will now learn how a
regional hospital seeking efficiency -- and a teaching hospital seeking performance -- are
meeting their unique requirements, thanks to modern IT architectures.
Here to help us understand the multilevel benefits of composable
infrastructure and software defined data centers (SDDCs) in the fast-
changing healthcare field are our guests, Filip Hens, Infrastructure Manager
at UZA Hospital in Antwerp, Belgium. Welcome, Filip.
Filip Hens: Thanks.
Gardner: We’re also here with Kim Buts, Infrastructure Manager at Imelda
Hospital in Bonheiden, Belgium. Welcome.
Kim Buts: Thank you.
Gardner: What are some of the top trends disrupting the healthcare industry in Belgium? Filip,
why do things need to change? Why do you need to have better IT infrastructure?
Hens: That’s a good question. There are many up-and-coming trends. One is new regulations
around governance, which is quite important. Due to these new rules, we are working more
closely together with other hospitals to share more data, and therefore need better data
security. This is one of the main reasons that we need to change.
In Belgium, we have many hospitals, with some of them only a few kilometers apart. Yet there
have been very few interactions between them.
Hens

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New demands around augmentation of services means patient data are a growing concern. So
it’s not only the needs of new governance but also the demand for providing better medical
services across hospitals.
Gardner: Kim, how are the economics of healthcare -- of doing more with less -- an ongoing
requirement? How are you able to conserve on the costs?
Buts: We are trying to do everything we can across the financial possibilities.
We are constantly looking for good solutions that are affordable. The
obligation to work in a [hospital] cluster provides us with a lot of new
challenges.
A major challenge for us was around security. We have invested hugely in
security. Many of the new applications are now shared across the hospital
cluster. So we chose to take on the role of innovator. And to continue
innovating, we have to spend a lot of money. That was not foreseen in the
annual budget. So we took advantage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s
(HPE’s) new financial services approaches, to make things happen much
faster than usual.
Gardner: We’ll get back to some of those services, but I’d like to help our readers and listeners
better understand this interesting combination of needing to compete -- that is to attract patients
-- but at the same time cooperate and share data across hospital cluster. Filip, tell us about UZA
and how you’re unique compared to a regional hospital. What makes you different?
Sharing is caring, and saving
Hens: Our main focus remains patient care, but for us it is not necessarily general medicine. It
is more the specialist cases, for such things as specialized surgery. That is our main goal. Also
we are a teaching hospital, so we have an emphasis on learning from patients and from patient
data.
Gardner: You have unique IT and big data requirements from your researchers. You have more
of an intense R&D environment, and that comes with a different set of IT requirements?
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And Life Sciences
Hens: Yes, and that is very important. We are more demanding of the quality of the data, the
need to gather more information, and to provide our researchers a better infrastructure platform.
That is one difference between a general hospital and a university hospital. A teaching facility
has more complex patient analytics requirements, the need for complex data mining and stuff
like that.
Gardner: Kim, how are you in your healthcare cluster now able to share and cooperate? What
is it that you’re sharing, and how do you that securely to creating better healthcare outcomes?
Buts

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Buts: A big difference for us is financial. Since we are a smaller hospital, we must offer a very
broad portfolio of treatments. That means we need to have a lot of patients to then have enough
income to survive. The broad offering, that portfolio of treatments, also means we are going to
need to work more together with the other cluster members.
We are now trying to buy new IT equipment together,
because we cannot afford to each buy for every kind of
surgery, or for every kind of treatment. So we have
combined our budgets together and we are hosting
different things in our hospital that are then used by the
other cluster members, too.
Financially, due to the regulations, we have less income than a university hospital. The benefits
of education funding do not get to us. We only get income from patients, and that is why we
need to have a broad portfolio.
Hens: Unlike a general hospital, we have income from the government and we also have an
income flow from scientific research. It is huge funding; it is a huge amount. That is really what
makes us different. That is why we need to use all of that data, to elaborate on scientific
research from the data.
If not an advantage, it is an extra benefit that we have as university hospital. In the end, it is very
important in that we maintain and add extra business functionality via an updated IT
infrastructure.
If we maintain those clusters well -- the general hospitals together with university hospitals --
then those clusters can share among themselves how to best meet patient needs, and
concentrate on using the sparest amount of the budget.
Robust research, record keeping, required
Gardner: You are therefore both trying to grapple with the use and sharing of electronic
medical records (EMR) applications. Are you both upgrading to using a different system? How
are you going about the difficult task of improving and modernizing EMR?
Buts: One big difference between our hospitals is our doctors; they are working for the hospital
on a self-employed basis at Imelda. They are not employees of the hospital as at UZA. The
demands of our doctors are therefore very high, so we have to improve all of our facilities -- and
our computer storage systems -- very fast.
We try to innovate for the doctors, so we have to spend a lot of money on innovation. That is a
big difference, I think, between the university hospitals because the doctors are employees
there.
Gardner: How does that impact your use of EMR systems?
We have combined our budgets
together and we are hosting
different things in our hospital
that are then used by the other
cluster members, too.

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Buts: We are in the process of changing. We are looking for a new EMR system. We are
discussing and we are choosing, but the demands of the doctors are sometimes different from
the demands of the general hospital management.
Gardner: Filip, EMR, is that something you are grappling with, too?
Hens: We did the same evaluations and we have
already chosen a new EMR. For us, implementing an
EMR is now all about consolidation of a very
scattered data landscape, of moving toward a
centralized organization, and of centralizing
databases for sharing and optimization of that data.
There is some pressure between what physicians
want and what we as IT can deliver with the EMR.
Let’s just say it is an opportunity. It is an opportunity
to understand each other better, to know why they have high demands, and why we have other
demands.
That comparison between the physicians and us IT guys makes it a challenging landscape. We
are busier with the business side and with full IT solutions, rather than just implementing
something.
It is not just about implementing something new, but adaptation of a new structure of people.
Our people rethink how everybody’s role is changing in the hospital, and what is needed for
interaction with everybody. So, we are in the process of that transformation.
Gardner: What is it about the underlying IT infrastructure that is going to support the agility
needed to solve both of your sets of problems, even though they are somewhat different?
Filip, tell us about what you have chosen for infrastructure and why composable infrastructure
helps solve many these business-level challenges.
Composable confidence
Hens: That is a good question, because choosing a solution is not like going to the
supermarket and just buy something. It is a complex process. We still have separation of data
storage and computing power.
We still separate that kind of stuff because we want to concentrate on the things that really bring
added value, and that are also trustworthy. For us, that means virtualization on the server and
network platforms, to make it more composable.
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And Life Sciences
Implementing an EMR is now all
about consolidation of a very
scattered data landscape, of
moving toward a centralized
organization, and of centralizing
databases for sharing and
optimization of that data.

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A more software-defined and composable approach will make us more independent from the
underlying hardware. We have chosen for our data center the HPE Synergy platform. In our
opinion, we are ready because after many years as an HPE customer -- it just works.
And for me, knowing that something is working is very important, but understanding the pitfalls
of a project is even more important. For me, the open discussion that you can have with HPE
about those pitfalls, of how to prepare for them and how to adapt your people to know what’s to
come in the future -- that is all very important.
It’s not only a decision about the metal, but also about what are the weaknesses in the metal
and how we can overcome that -- that is why we stick with HPE, because we have a good
relationship.
Gardner: Kim, what are you doing to modernize, but also innovate around those all-important
economic questions? How are you using pay-as-you-go models to afford more complex
technology, and to give you advancement in serving your customers?
One-stop shopping
Buts: The obligations of the new hospital-cluster regulations had a huge impact on our IT
infrastructure. We had to modernize. We needed more compute power and more storage. When
we began calculating, it showed us that replacing all of the hard drives at one time was the best
option, instead of spreading it over the next three to four years.
Also the new workload demands on the infrastructure
meant we needed to replace it as fast as possible, but
the budget was not available at our hospitals. So HPE
Financial Services provided us with a solution that
meant we could replace all our equipment with very
short notice. We exchanged servers, storage, and our
complete network, including our Wi-Fi network.
So we actually started with a completely brand new
data center thanks to the financial services of HPE.
Gardner: How does that financing work? Is that a pay-as-you-go, or are payments spread over
time?
Kim Buts: It’s spread over the coming five years. That was the only solution that was good for
us. We could not afford to do it any other way.
Gardner: So that is more like an operating costs budget than an upfront capital outlays budget?
Buts: Yes, and the other thing we wanted to do was do everything with HPE -- because they
could offer us a complete range of servers, storage, and Wi-Fi networking. That way we could
reduce the complexity of all our work, and it guaranteed us a fast return on the investment.
Gardner: It is all more integrated, upfront.
We needed more compute power
and more storage. When we
began calculating, it showed us
that replacing all of the hard
drives at once was the best
option, instead of spreading it
over the next three to four years.

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Buts: Yes, that is correct.
Gardner: At UZA, what are you doing to even further modernize your infrastructure to
accommodate more data, research, sharing, and security?
Hens: It is not about what I want to deliver; it is about what the business wants that we can
deliver, and what we can together deliver to the hospital. So, for me, the next step is the EMR
program.
So, implementing the EMR, looking for the outcomes from it, and offering something better to
end-users. Then those outcomes can be used to further modernize the infrastructure.
That for me is the key. I will not necessarily say that we will buy more HPE Synergy. For me, the
key to the process, as I just described, that is what will set the margins of what we will need.
Gardner: Kim, now that you have a new data center, where do you take it next in terms of
people, process or even added technology efficiencies? Improved data and analytics, perhaps?
Cloud in the Cluster?
Buts: That is a difficult one because the cluster is very new for us. We are still looking at good
ways to incorporate and decide where the data is going to be placed, and what services are
going to be required.
It is still brand new for us, and we have to find a good way to incorporate it all with the different
hospital cluster members. A big issue is how are we going to exchange the critical patient data,
and how we are going to store it safely and securely.
Gardner: Is cloud computing going to be a part of that?
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And Life Sciences
Buts: I do not know. Everything is “cloud” now so, maybe. I am not a huge fan of public cloud.
If you can stay in a private cloud, yeah, then okay. But public cloud, I do not know. In a hospital,
regulations are so strong and the demands are so high.
Gardner: Maybe a shared private cloud environment of some sort?
Buts: Yeah. I think that could be a good solution.
Hens: For public cloud in general, I think that is a no-go. But what we are doing already with our
EMR, we can work together with a couple of hospitals and we can choose to build a private
cloud at one of the sites at our hospitals.

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You do not need to define it as a cloud. Really, it’s like public Internet cloud, but you have to
make your IT cloud-aware and cloud-defined inside the walls of your hospital. That is the first
track you need to take.
Buts: That is why in our hospital cluster, we chose to host a lot of new applications on the new
hardware. It gave us the ability to learn and adapt quickly to the new innovations. And for the
other hospitals, we are now becoming a kind of service provider to them. That was for us a big
change, because now we are more a service level agreements (SLA)-driven organization than
we used to be.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how two Belgian
hospitals are adjusting to a dynamic healthcare and economics environment. They are both
competing and cooperating. And we have learned how multi-level benefits of composable and
software-defined data centers are helping them to meet many of their transformation
requirements.
So please join me in thanking our guests, Filip Hens, Infrastructure Manager at UZA Hospital in
Antwerp. Thank you.
Hens: Thank you also.
Gardner: And Kim Buts, Infrastructure Manager at Imelda Hospital in nearby Bonheiden,
Belgium. Thank you.
Buts: Thank you very much.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise sponsored interviews.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this content along to your IT community, and do
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how two Belgian hospitals are adjusting to dynamic healthcare
economics by leveraging the multilevel benefits of composable infrastructure and pay-as-you-go
buying options for data centers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights
reserved.
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