Overview
Clinical and business leaders at Tampa General Hospital rely on a “daily blast” dashboard that’s filled with critical information they need for daily hospital operations. Unfortunately, maintaining and updating the dashboard in a timely manner created a number of challenges for the IT staff responsible for managing and distributing it to executives by the daily 8:00 a.m. deadline, even before the pandemic struck. The dashboard is intended to provide an easy-to-digest, single view of hospital operations. But providing this single view depends on dozens of workflows executing on disparate systems inside and outside the hospital.
The Challenge
Most of the daily work needed to run and coordinate jobs, gather their results, and then build and distribute the dashboard was done manually. That left the analytics/BI team responsible for producing the dashboard with almost no margin for error, and it motivated the team to find a more practical, efficient, and automated way to use business intelligence throughout the organization.
“As we navigate day by day through this public health crisis, the dashboard is helping us save lives. It gives us situational awareness of resources that are available across the region to take care of COVID-19 patients. It breaks down silos between competing hospitals for this collaborative community effort.”
— Dr. Peter Chang , Vice President of Care Transitions, Tampa General Hospital
The Solution
In February 2019, the team implemented Control-M to manage the daily dashboard development. They selected the platform because it can automate, monitor, and manage workflows across a variety of computing and software platforms in hybrid, on-premises, and cloud architectures. By applying predictive analytics, Control-M can detect potential delays or failures before they happen and automatically trigger remediation. In addition, Control-M Managed File Transfer and other ETL (extract, transform, load) capabilities can automate, orchestrate, monitor, and troubleshoot the numerous data exchanges that need to occur to produce the daily dashboard.
A few months later, Control-M proved invaluable as the hospital mounted its COVID-19 response. Tampa General had to enable its regional hospital systems to submit COVID-19 data to provide critical information about the region’s resources and mitigate potential stress on any system of care. The hospital was willing, but there were IT security constraints for submitting files, including the need for static IP addresses. Since most people were working from home due to the pandemic, this wasn't possible.
Tampa General worked around the static IP requirement by using Control-M’s native support for Amazon S3 to create user accounts there. It then used Control-M’s Managed File Transfer to provide bidirectional access to the files and resources employees need to work successfully from remote locations.
Business Impact
The team at Tampa General set thresholds and created marker jobs to track potential delays, and now automatically receives notification if anything rises to a level that could impact dashboard delivery by their 8:00 a.m. SLA. Doing so has eliminated the need for staff to do things in the middle of the night and has allowed them to consistently deliver dashboards on-time.
As a result, critical information that hospital administrators and clinicians need to deliver care to patients is received on time. This benefit was particularly beneficial when developing regional dashboards for COVID-19. Control-M proved its value and breadth by helping Tampa General work across multiple onsite and cloud systems to produce its daily dashboards, then proved its scalability during the pandemic.