NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), a global cloud-led, data-centric software company, today announced that it has been selected by Narayana Health to modernize its IT systems and satisfy the new demands of healthcare management. NetApp will help Narayana Health to optimise storage and data management efficiencies across locations thereby helping advance medical care in India.  

With this collaboration, Narayana Health unveiled Athma - a homegrown records management system that allows the company to manage its data securely and efficiently while taking advantage of NetApp® solutions.  

As one of the largest hospital groups in the country, Narayana Health treats over 2.6 million patients every year, making data critical to its operations. A huge challenge faced by the group was to provide rapid access to patient records to facilitate faster diagnosis and shorter response times. Because a reliable and responsive IT infrastructure was crucial to achieving this objective, Narayana Health deployed NetApp technology solutions to store and process patient records and images. The resulting system, Athma, captures, stores, and retrieves networks across 15 sites. The system enables medical staff and patients to access their entire medical history in a few seconds-further enhancing the quality of healthcare services provided by Narayana. 

Elaborating on NetApp’s offering, Ramu Manjunath, Core Infrastructure Head, Narayana Health, said, “NetApp comes with a unique approach to data management. Storing data on NetApp is much faster compared to the other solution providers. It offered simple and easy infrastructure management solutions to our engineers. The whole shift to NetApp was fairly simple and seamless from implementation, architectural, and support standpoints.” 

“With Athma, patients have the complete continuity of their entire medical history. Their history is available in our system and can be pulled in a few seconds, so the doctors can review and take a call rather than going back and forth finding records or reinvesting in investigations,” he added. 

Speaking about the impact the collaboration aims to bring, Puneet Gupta, managing director & VP India/SAARC, NetApp India Marketing and Services, said, “Simplicity is at the core of everything we do at NetApp. Our solutions are designed to be easy to implement as well as scalable. For the new-age medical care providers, accessibility to data and healthcare records is of prime importance today. With our legacy and experience in data management, and our core technology offerings, we are happy to contribute to the changing healthcare landscape in India. It’s an accomplishment to see our solutions directly enable medical practitioners to offer better medical care to the needy.” 

The centralized storage system for data and applications is built on NetApp and is made available on the cloud. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP® software makes storage easy to manage. Two fully replicated data centers, one in central India and the other in south India, are running backup and recovery using Azure NetApp Files and NetApp file services. The system provides clinical staff with critical and timely insights that further enable them to extend better care to patients.  

The Narayana Health hospital system plans to expand: It plans to increase the number of locations and add more clinical services to its 60-plus specialties. Over the course of this expansion, NetApp technology will help. Cloud Volumes ONTAP will provide the ability to manage optimization, and tools such as the NetApp Active IQ® Digital Advisor will help the hospital system manage and optimise costs.