Agfa HealthCare
safeguards critical
Case Study
Objective
Deliver eective suppor t for digital
imaging solutions spread throughout
100+ UK hospitals
Approach
Created a flexible support contract that
would give nationwide coverage for the
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hardware
IT Matters
• Delivers a 24x7x365 Call-to-Repair
service, resulting in high system
availability and better performance
• Provides early warning alerts through
eective remote monitoring
• Includes firmware upgrades delivered
by an aligned Technical Account
Manager and regular planning
meetings with assigned Account
Support Manager
Business Matters
• Avoids missed SLAs
• Provides a better service for hospitals
and their patients
• Raises the company’s profile
and competitiveness within the
UK health service
medical systems
HPE Datacenter Care supports mission
critical medical services
Agfa HealthCare has
to deliver solutions in
challenging environments
with stringent service levels
for its diagnostic imaging
systems. Running on HPE
hardware, the solutions
are installed in over 100
hospitals across a wide
geographic footprint,
so providing eective
support was a challenge.
For Agfa, the solution was
HPE Datacenter Care.
Challenge
Need for nationwide support
Providing eective support for critical IT
systems can be a diicult task but it’s even
more challenging when the systems are
located across a wide geographic footprint
in multi-site NHS Trusts, within customerprovided infrastructures.
This was the situation faced by Agfa
HealthCare, the global provider of
diagnostic imaging and healthcare IT
solutions. A Belgian multinational company
with revenues of over €1.16 billion, Agfa
HealthCare is part of the Agfa-Gevaert
Group. With over a century of healthcare
experience in medical imaging, it has been
an active player in the healthcare IT market
since the early 1990s and now has sales
oices and representatives in over 100
markets worldwide.
Case study
Agfa HealthCare
“Medical solutions are highly regulated and we cannot aord
any instances of data loss or outages, therefore proactive monitoring
by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and resilient platforms are a critical
part of our solution design. The HPE service allows us to focus on
our solutions and not spend large amounts of time and cost managing
our storage vendor.”
— Philip Brown, third party service manager, Agfa HealthCare
Industry
Healthcare
Page 2
Agfa HealthCare develops software for
capturing and archiving various medical
images but rather than delivering just the
software, it wanted to provide customers
with total solutions including both the
software and the systems to drive it.
“We provide the full range of hardware
from high-end workstations up to the core
servers, tape libraries and storage,” explains
Philip Brown, third party service manager for
Agfa HealthCare.
“We have a managed service model. Again
customers purchase a service from Agfa
and we deal with all the details regarding
hardware, software and maintenance.
Ninety-eight per cent of our systems run on
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hardware.”
HPE systems are purchased in Belgium
and go to a staging depot where Agfa
HealthCare and HPE sta configure the
hardware, load the software and test the
systems before they are shipped to the UK
and installed in individual hospitals or other
healthcare locations. However, that’s not
the end of the engagement because the
systems are governed by stringent Service
Level Agreements (SLAs).
This situation was created when the UK’s
Department of Health launched its National
Programme for IT, an initiative designed to
move England towards a single, centrallymandated electronic care record for
patients. It split the country into five regions
and nominated five Local Service Providers
(LSPs). Technology services company
Accenture was one of these and was made
the prime contractor to supply IT goods and
services to England’s North East and East
Midlands region. It then sub-contracted
the provision of digital imaging and image
management solutions to Agfa HealthCare
for seven years in a contract that includes
30 Trusts.
“Good support is critical because the
customers need high availability and a
solution they can rely upon,” says Brown.
Solution
Flexibility is the key
Agfa HealthCare needed a comprehensive
support plan and to solve the problem, it
signed a Datacenter Care (DC) contract with
HPE. Initially, this covered just the 30 Trusts
in the LSP agreement but those figures
have more than doubled since DC has been
extended to other Agfa customers who are
not part of the LSP contract.
Case study
Agfa HealthCare
Industry
Healthcare
Page 3
HPE DC is an environment-wide support
solution that is tailored to meet the
individual needs of dierent customers.
This flexible, relationship-based approach
includes an Account Support Manager
(ASM) who knows the customers’ business
and IT environments. Aimed at reducing
complexity and risk, improving availability
and performance, saving time and reducing
cost, DC releases HPE customers from the
worry of system support, leaving their sta
free to concentrate on business issues
and innovation.
Agfa HealthCare’s DC contract includes a
service connection to HPE, which remotely
monitors the IT environment and provides
proactive alerts and troubleshooting
support. System upgrades are delivered
by HPE Assigned Technical specialists
only and the whole operation is based
around an agreed Account Support Plan
including regular monthly meetings with
the aligned ASM who provides one point
of accountability.
Flexibility is a keyword with DC, and
Agfa has seen that in action as Brown
explains: “the initial model was a swap out
arrangement with pre-built equipment
located at strategic depots in the country
from where they could be quickly deployed,
even out of hours. However, we found
that we couldn’t turn things round quickly
enough to alleviate breaches of the SLAs
so we looked to HPE to move over to
a dierent model. Now, the key area is
24x7x365, Call-to-Repair which, in practice, is
enough for us to meet SLAs.”
Another aspect which underlines the
flexibility of DC is a Media Retention Plan
which has been added to the contract to
meet customer evolving requirements.
“Healthcare sites are naturally concerned
regarding the security of patient information,
particularly in the electronic age. If, for
example, a storage system had a failed disk
they require that the disk is destroyed by a
certified process, as it may contain patient
data,” says Brown. “We asked HPE to cover
that o and they have done so.”
In tandem with the DC contract, HPE
has also undertaken Customer Asset
Programme (CAP) audits to provide a
clear picture of what equipment is in which
hospital. HPE CAP collates an up-to-date
asset inventory of the entire IT environment
including location, quantity, server name,
manufacturer, product numbers, serial
numbers and product description. This
enables Agfa HealthCare to pinpoint the
physical assets on each site and confirm the
required level of support.
Benefits
System availability
The main benefit of DC for Agfa HealthCare
is that by proactively rectifying problems
it achieves higher system availability and
minimises any impact on service availability.
Case study
Agfa HealthCare
Industry
Healthcare
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE servers
• HPE workstations
• HPE storage
Software
• Agfa HealthCare diagnostic
imaging systems
HPE services
• HPE Datacenter Care
• HPE Customer Asset Programme
• HPE Insight Remote Support
• Defective Media Retention
“We can tailor the HPE Datacenter Care service, matching
the level of support to individual items of equipment. We
have everything covered and it’s easier to manage our
solution because everyone knows what to expect from
HPE and what they need to deliver.”
— Philip Brown, third party service manager, Agfa HealthCare
“In addition the remote monitoring with
HPE IRS is also a very eective service,”
adds Brown. “It gives us 24x7x365 alerts into
our helpdesk with a dashboard system and
it will pre-warn us even before the customer
is aware of a potential issue.”
Currently, incidents come in to Agfa’s
helpdesk and are logged into the Service
Management System then support
requirements are relayed to third parties
like HPE. With the new IRS system sta in
the oice will have a link and an application
open on the screen with a direct connection
to the web and HPE’s portal. They can see
red, amber and green traic lights which
will tell them if any sites are having issues
and HPE will have already mobilised their
engineers with the spare parts ready to
ship to site. The benefit of this proactive
solution is that it identifies faults before
they actually stop equipment running and
have a greater impact.
“Having our own ASM is also a huge
advantage benefiting from their support,
knowledge and contacts enabling us to
continually move things forward in terms
of the service we provide. We have regular
monthly meetings where we go through
reports and performance indicators, parts
used and assess the whole estate to
make sure that it is operating eiciently,”
says Brown.
As well as the operational and financial
benefits of HPE Datacenter Care, delivering
such a reliable level of service enables
healthcare professionals to provide better
patient care through constant access to
vital diagnostic imagery. This kind of unique
oering is something that both Agfa and
HPE are extremely proud of and makes the
partnership and relationship so eective.
Potential issues are very often proactively
resolved very quickly, well in advance, with
no loss of service.
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© Copyright 2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for HPE products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such
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technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA5-7090EEW, November 2015, Rev. 2
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