EPIC Healthcare revisited

trilobite_rex

There was a thread where EPIC healthcare systems were talked about.  My company is switching over to that system and I'd like to know what anyone whose company has used it did?

• Is system pulse the be all end all when it comes to monitoring epic systems?
• If not, what services/processes did you monitor on the various disciplines.

Toying with the thought of putting the system pulse into an custom html if all else fails.

Thanks

jm_sysadmin

So system pulse is required by Epic for their support. A great many things will be alerting for them from that tool as well.

I don't know anything about how your organization is structured, but let talk about how it works here, and then hopefully you can use it to inform your choices. First, our Epic staff count is a significant chunk of of overall number, maybe half? They have teams that doe all sorts of application type work for different areas but has one group that deal with 'common infrastructure' of Epic systems. They set up and install the app servers for the other teams, maintain the database, and deal with things like printing and monitoring. They 'own' System Pulse while people need it, and have access it doesn't pull all the stuff that Orion has. Technically, there are 2 system pulse systems, the on site server that the team configures, and one that gets data from the Database, and has more meta data on how things perform. 

Here, we have all those systems in Orion also. We also monitor the applications, and since we have most of the modules, we know how Epic fits into the the environment. We see in Orion where in VMware they run, we can chart from the disks in storage appliances and interfaces on the network all the way up to the process stats in the app itself.

When things are going wrong, IS as a whole won't use System Pulse, so we need to have a good representation of Epic in Orion. And System pulse does what it does, but when that team needs more, they come to me to help them. For instance, we have downtime workstations that pull in copies of the units patients that would get printed if Epic ever went offline. We have lots of units, and it can be hard to keep track of the health of those devices. With Orion, we import the workstations from an OU, they get added to a group for the correct Sam template to apply, and we have dashboards that quickly show status, and pull in Data from IPAM so that we know where the devices are physically. We also have alerts that generate Incident tickets if they are not online, and the ticket get routed to the correct locations support team since we understand that. Its all automated, and System pulse just doesn't have a place to deal with all the extra workflow stuff. They can manually add in the computers, and notify a distribution list, but people would have to fill in the gaps.

So we need Orion to provide a window into the bigger picture of IT Systems, to bring Epic data out to non-Epic staff, and to handle more types of workflows. 

@trilobite_rex feel free to DM me as you get going.