C2C Diagnoses and Treats What's Ailing the Email System at Fletcher Allen Heath Care
Widgets & RSS FeedsFletcher Allen Health Care serves as a regional referral center—providing advanced care to approximately 1 million people in Vermont and northern New York—and as a community hospital for approximately 150,000 residents in Chittenden and Grand Isle counties. As Vermont’s only academic medical center, Fletcher Allen’s mission is to improve the health of the people it serves by integrating patient care, education and research in a caring environment.
The Challenge
Managing patient records at any healthcare facility is mission critical. With more than 30 patient care sites and 100 outreach clinics, programs and services through its service region, employees at Fletcher Allen depend on email as an important means of communication.
“As a hospital, many people feel we have to keep email messages forever,” says David Haber, senior systems engineer at Fletcher Allen. “Some retention is required by regulations, such as HIPAA, while many are kept for the users’ own use. They feel it is good to have and to keep—to recall patient information or for billing or insurance issues that may arise.”
As the volume of email messages continued to grow, with more than 7,000 mailboxes with some records dating back to as early as 1998, space management became an issue. Mailbox quotas of 50 MB per user were imposed, which proved problematic for those who received large attachments, some as large as 30 MB each.
“We have several heavy email users with large attachments,” said Haber. “One employee has over 3 GB of PSTs and insisted that he had to keep every one of them. It was important to find a system that not only improved our storage issues, but also ensured that valuable email data wasn’t lost in the process.”
The Solution
With oversized mailboxes stuffed with attachments including Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, large Word documents with embedded images and other records, backups and restores were taking forever. Instead of storing all of the messages in individual mailboxes, Fletcher Allen turned to C2C to archive the email files. The company’s MaX Compression product immediately reduces by 50 percent each mailbox by automatically zipping and unzipping attachments sent by users on the client side, with similar reductions of legacy data on Fletcher Allen’s three clustered Exchange servers.
The reduced-sized messages are then archived using C2C’s ArchiveOne solution, a product family of email and file archiving, eDiscovery, compliance management, legal forensics and storage management tools. A user has seamless access to the archived content. The user just clicks the attachment icon and the message is instantly retrieved and treated just like regular email. The process is transparent to users and because the mailboxes are now smaller and easier to manage, mailbox quotas are no longer an issue. Because the message content is safely archived on the server, C2C allows for virtually unlimited-sized email boxes.
The Results
“The email system is not a constraint on the business and users can get on with their tasks in running and providing healthcare to the community,” states Haber. “I like C2C’s whole approach to archiving and management. It’s been a really great product for us.”
Since implementing the C2C solution, Fletcher Allen has upgraded its messaging system to Exchange 2007, which allows multiple copies of large databases, and it switched from a tape backup system to a NetApp solution. These changes have made file management issues less pressing than they once were, but Haber still believes in the value of keeping databases small. Haber continues to value C2C’s ability to reduce email size and move it out of the database for faster recovery times, in the case of disaster. And he is continuing to implement additional functionality of C2C’s email archiving solution for even more improved management.
Fletcher Allen just successfully concluded testing with a PST file management tool from C2C that will help discover, index and archive personal storage files. The tool brings ease of management of this data, regardless of where it resides on the network, enabling the files to be processed based on intelligent, defined policies without impinging on network or Microsoft Exchange operations.
“It looks like it is going to work great and it’s going to save a lot of time,” said Haber. “We currently have about 300 GB of PST files to move into the archive. So we’ll probably have about a TB of archived email total after implementation. C2C provides a good solution. ArchiveOne does exactly what they said it will do.”
