Hospital El Pilar provides the best professional care to its patients with the help of Paessler PRTG

About Hospital El Pilar

Hospital El Pilar was founded on October 12, 1963, in the City of Guatemala with the aim of rendering customized healthcare services and the best professional care to patients.

To fulfill this purpose, they have always encouraged the professional development of its staff, who are the hospital's main asset and who carry out their daily activities based on a culture of quality and service. The hospital has the top quality, extensive facilities, together with the most advanced technology, research and training. All of this for a single commitment: healthcare.

The authorities of Hospital El Pilar are focused on implementing continuous improvement plans by applying the most updated scientific knowledge and using the most recent available technology in order to relieve the suffering of patients and their relatives.

Hospital El Pilar has become a leading hospital by placing knowledge and technology at the service of the human being.

Therefore, they have efficient administrative processes, a network communication system that offers immediate access to information and enquiries, and a peaceful, harmonious environment that reflects respect towards the human being.

Some hospital facts

5 international certifications
+50 years of experience
9 operating rooms
1,278 births per year
20,346 patients per year
10,444 emergency services per year
5,247 pediatric emergencies per year
3,377 surgeries per year

“With PRTG, we are now more proactive and have improved the quality of our services. Now, we have everything measured: power, air conditioning, tanks, surveillance cameras (CCTV), processors, memories, disks, switches, bandwidth, and network traffic. We can see what is happening and act before any problem arises.”

Esbin Saúl Lázaro García, IT Infrastructure and Security Engineer at Hospital El Pilar

Challenge

Hospital El Pilar has the challenge of monitoring its IT security infrastructure to offer its users a timely, complete, secure service. Thus, the hospital decided to implement Paessler PRTG Network Monitor in order to effectively monitor IT infrastructure assets. To this end, the hospital developed an IT security infrastructure monitoring plan with the aim of consolidating and simplifying the monitoring system.

“We want to include the tool in our set of solutions in order to solve problems more proactively in our technology infrastructure. This is why we selected PRTG to monitor our servers, switches, security cameras and critical hospital applications through its single unified dashboard, which easily provides an overview of our essential systems. It has exceeded all our expectations because it is a reliable, extremely easy-to-use solution. There is no doubt that it lives up to the renowned quality of German technology”, said Esbin Saúl Lázaro García, IT Infrastructure and Security Engineer at Hospital El Pilar.

Solution

PRTG monitoring team at Hospital EL Pilar

At the end of 2017, Hospital El Pilar bought the monitoring software PRTG to easily monitor all critical components of security operations and IT infrastructure by means of a simple dashboard and reliable alerts.

“We can now view, in the solution dashboard, real-time performance indicators of our IT infrastructure, and metrics in user-friendly graphs regarding the management of incidents, problems and changes in our infrastructure. With PRTG, analysts have access to relevant indicators in a single place, as well as failures of systems used by the hospital, and infrastructure efficiency”, added Lázaro.

“For example, we were not able to detect a problem in the data center until we installed the PRTG sensors and noticed that the air conditioning was causing a dew point in the environment, which was increasing the humidity in a sensitive operating area. We can now control humidity, carbon monoxide (fire precursor) and temperature, among others. This solution also helped us notice that some servers were crashing when updated with Windows because there was not enough space on the disks to carry out the process. Both incidents were highlighted (and subsequently resolved) by monitoring the infrastructure 24x7”, explained Lázaro.

The expertise of the company Ordenador Digital, S.A., partner of Paessler AG, provided technical support for the solution and trained hospital teams to perform the best monitoring operations in order to maximize the use of the solution and monitor critical hospital services appropriately.

Advantages

The PRTG solution implemented at Hospital el Pilar was quickly incorporated as a useful, practical, and complete tool to monitor all the digital services provided by the IT department from a single place.

Some monitoring highlights

PRTG is very easy to use
It achieves high availability (99.9999%)
The hospital has reduced server operating costs by USD 200k
They now monitor 70 servers and their applications, security cameras (CCTV), network switches, etc.
The IT team has become a proactive department and can now detect abnormalities in the digital environment in time

Conclusion

Hospital El Pilar will keep using PRTG to monitor their services and support to users. "Our intention, in the short term, is to expand our subscription according to the number of accounts that we add to the operations because our services always have PRTG embedded sensors”, said Lázaro.

“We will continue adding sensors to our infrastructure. We will integrate everything that can help us measure and control our operations to be more efficient when working. This is thanks to PRTG monitoring software. We are also planning to add access to the PRTG mobile apps. We are very interested in this feature because it can help us extend our monitoring capabilities, especially in this new era of teleworking. PRTG enables us to take this alert dashboard to the devices of our security analysts, who sometimes work in remote locations”, added Lázaro.