Healius

Healius is a leading Australian healthcare provider that provides much-needed specialty diagnostic services through an extensive network of pathology labs and diagnostic centers. The company focuses on determining the cause and nature of diseases, including cancer diagnoses. Healius has partnered with NetApp to help with their data strategy by improving their infrastructure to better accommodate AI workloads and massive data requirements.

Healius focuses on pathology, which is a medical specialty that helps determine the cause and nature of diseases. In fact, according to the company, 70% of all medical decisions and 100% of cancer diagnoses rely on a pathology test. Healius’ mission in pathology is to deliver accurate and timely results.

Healius also needed a more robust and efficient way of managing their patient data, which reached back 50 years.

In addition, Healius wanted to apply new AI algorithms in the pursuit of better analysis.

“We were hamstrung before we started this digital transformation,” said Alex Larson, Chief Technology Officer at Healius. “Our old hyper-converged infrastructure was failing.

With new NetApp AFF A-Series, C-Series, and FAS9500, Healius is now able to unlock their vast data stores, move workloads and data to speed their operations. Results are almost immediately accessible. System reliability is now greatly improved.

“We are actively using AI for faster, accurate diagnosis,” Larson said. “We can speed up the diagnosis by a factor of 10.”

The new NetApp storage systems and intelligent data infrastructure approach has overhauled their performance and reliability. In addition, with the transition to better on-prem solutions, Healius has been able to eliminate its excessive cloud costs.

“It was absolutely incredible,” Larson said. “By using NetApp storage, we actually saved between $5 and $10 million dollars through basically not having to pay cloud costs.”

Operational efficiency is vital in pathology to keep costs down, which means getting more volume out of the labs and diagnostic centers.

But according to Larson, it’s not just about cost savings. It’s enabling a better quality of life for patients.

“With this technology, doctors and clinicians can actually diagnose a much wider range of conditions with greater accuracy and speed,” he said. “So, all of a sudden quality of life is going up because our treatment of our patients is improving. We see this as a huge differentiator for the organization.”