RANCHO CUCAMONGA, CA – The Wilshire Oncology Medical Group has implemented a new monitoring system to keep an eye on IT infrastructure, workstations and online connectivity.

Based in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., the oncology group includes a team of 20 cancer specialist and six individual medical sites. The group also has a fully functioning electronic medical record.

The system is being overseen by a supervisor that few medical groups around the country have.

“IT director is a new position,” said Eric Hill, director of information technology at Wilshire. “The medical group left it up to me to make a title for the position. I started using IT administrator and later it was changed to director of IT. I started as a billing clerk and then went to work for a software company. I specialize in HIT for small and medium medical groups.”

Hill’s projects at Wilshire include implementation of the Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, a system monitor that is programmable to watch specific systems and connections at the practice.

“I had to set a goal for myself,” said Hill. “I allocated a month to look at trial projects and manuals, and I wanted to have the capabilities and features that fit our practice. The implementation was completed within seven weeks and I had other projects going on at the same time. The technology had a learning curve, and even now I’m still tweaking it.”

“We only spent less than $300 for 100 sensors, availability and everything else,” said Hill, “so it didn’t break the bank. Once I learned what I could do with it we moved forward. The next level was 500 sensors, and that ran $750. It was very easy for me to calculate that the software would pay for itself.”

The practice did require some specific adjustments. Wilshire provides full radiology and CT scans that are sent out and read offsite, so online connections were a top priority. The monitoring system, Hill said, gives him the ability to diagnose a problem and fix it before disaster strikes.

“If you ask typical staff, they don’t notice it and I can use it to monitor problems with workstations for a period of time,” he said.

Wilshire officials said the monitoring system would be used to detect problems with file transfers from third-party interfaces and decrease wait times for patients at the provider sites.

“We deployed 283 remote sensors across the company’s network,” said Christian Twardawa, chief operating officer of Paessler, which is based in Germany. “PRTG does everything from monitoring Wilshire’s Internet connectivity and virtual private network (VPN) connections to monitoring the speed and reliability of connections with its third-party vendors, battery backups, 16 physical servers, nine virtual machines and even some individual workstations.”

Wilshire officials say they’re looking to upgrade server hardware and reduce the number of servers used by the group’s EMR.

“A number of our servers are reaching the end of their life cycle,” said Hill. “And our EMR stack uses seven servers, and I’d like to reduce that. In the next couple of years as the servers reach the end of their life I’m going to push to get them virtualized.”