Red Cross Hospital achieves cost-savings with Zarafa Collaboration Platform

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The stable open source email solution for healthcare

The Red Cross Hospital (RKZ) is a medium-sized general hospital serving the Kennemerland area. Its Burn Treatment Centre is one of the leading units of its kind in the Netherlands and internationally, in both technical and scientific terms. The hospital is based in Beverwijk and has a polyclinic in Heemskerk. It has 406 beds and 1,400 members of staff.

The patient is central, and the hospital works to improve the quality of care on an ongoing basis. In addition, RKZ Beverwijk aspires to offer as comprehensive a package of professional care as possible. To do so, it works closely with general practitioners, home care providers, nursing homes and other care organizations in the area.

The IT department, led by Marcel Bunnik, has around eight people working in it.

“For user-friendly archiving in hospitals, data accessibility needs to be combined with efficient storage. The advanced archiving solution of the Zarafa Collaboration Platform responds well to this need”.

Marcel Bunnik, ICT team leader, Red Cross Hospital Beverwijk

Introduction

RKZ Beverwijk was used to working with MS Exchange. However, it was noticed that its performance was subject to increasingly frequent challenges. This was partly due to the sharp growth in the number of user accounts, from around 800 in 2008 to 1,400 in 2010. Due to lack of time and of the right people to perform the migration to another mail environment, a choice in favour of different software was put off – until late 2009, when the hospital decided to migrate its 1,400 staff to Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) 6.3.

Challenge
Once a decision had been made to overhaul the mail environment, RKZ Beverwijk identified the criteria that the new software needed to satisfy. As well as the desire to be able to manage the new mail environment completely inhouse and to reduce dependency on suppliers, the main motivating factor for moving over to open source software was the licensing fees. At that time, these amounted to 60 euros per user for the 1,400 desktops alone, not to mention software insurance and server licences. When it became clear that the migration to ZCP would deliver a saving of 50%, the decision was simple. Marcel Bunnik, ICT team leader at RKZ Beverwijk, points out in this connection that a very deliberate choice was made in favour of software with the desired functionality: “The software that we used at first was many times more expensive, and we got all kinds of extra stuff that we couldn’t use because we already had a Linux platform. You can compare it with a bag full of shopping when you only need the macaroni and don’t want to be carrying around a whole complex jumble of extra options with you.”

Within the ICT team there was no experience of open source calendar and mail software. The rapid advent of open source in the Dutch care sector, the Antonius Open project and Zarafa’s clear ambition to increase its market share in healthcare meant that the jump in at the deep end was taken in complete confidence.

Solution
A Zarafa partner implemented a virtual machine (VMWare) with ZCP, Red Hat 5, coupled with ActiveDirectory 2003, at RKZ Beverwijk.
Initially, the 1,400 hospital staff members continued using Outlook. Since 2011, homeworkers have also been able to use Zarafa’s WebAccess.
Migration
Before the actual migration took place, the hospital carried out an extensive pilot test with its partner. The aim of this was twofold: to see exactly how the ZCP integrated with the Outlook client and to gain a more focused view of what the key points for attention were for the migration. For example, the export and import of data were tested in a shadow environment.

High availability
To ensure high availability of email, all data is kept on a SAN which is replicated to an alternative location. If the mail server crashes at the main location, the server at the alternative location is activated manually.

There were quite a few changes compared with the old environment. Formerly, a quota of 25 Mb per user had been applied, and personal folders were created in Exchange. During the migration the quota ceased to be relevant; the personal folders were migrated to the server and the new SAN meant that disk space was no longer a problem. The eventual migration of all 1,400 members of staff took place over a weekend at the end of 2009, with the help of Zarafa migration tools.

The result
RKZ Beverwijk is happy with its decision to use ZCP and Red Hat. The choice of combination has resulted in cost-savings of 100,000 euros. Due to the internal virtualized environment, server performance has considerably improved, and it is easy to switch to another mail server, for example.

The desire to bring management completely inhouse has also been realized. The managers have been certified in the Zarafa Advanced Training, benefiting from the fact that Zarafa is based on general open source standards such as an Apache web server and a database.

During the migration, the system managers acquired additional knowledge, thanks to interaction with Zarafa’s partner. As a result, the ICT department is capable of managing the solution effectively. In functional terms, the resemblance to Outlook ensured that there was a minimal learning curve for the users.

Through the choice in favour of open source mail and calendar software, a step has been taken towards supplier independence. This means that process and functionality needs can be translated into ICT solutions with maximum flexibility, and future costs can be kept under control.