Jeff Kelly and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts for this segment, welcomed Ant Lefebvre, a senior systems engineer with Middlesex Hospital, to talk in depth about his application of Splunk in the healthcare business at the Splunk.conf 2013.

Today Ant is also leading a presentation at the event, called “HIPAA and Meaningful Use Audit Reports Using Splunk.” The Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut uses Splunk to create audit reports, to trigger alerts and gain better visibility into the EMR and other networked systems.

Learning from your peers

At one of the conferences Lefebvre was pleased to see someone running Splunk in a total virtual environment. They try to do the same at Middlesex Hospital, but “the opportunity to pick up some pointers from somebody else who’s been through it maybe a little longer than we had, or who had a different insight, has been invaluable.”

“With Splunk, all the stuff that I’ve been doing now, it’s got so much value and the sky is the limit with it,” said Lefebvre. “I am not just going on my ideas of what I think Splunk can do, I have a whole bunch of people showing me other things that I didn’t even think of I can do with it.”

Middlesex Hospital has three emergency departments spread across the county and around 25 network sights, 10 of them being primary care offices. “We do a lot of business throughout the county. We’ve used Splunk for both network operational intelligence, and audit a lot of stuff that our users are doing,” explained Lefebvre.

“We have a couple of data centers, two located in-hospital for redundancy and one located off-site for disaster recovery. We have a plethora of applications running: EMR, EHR for our patients, we have financial for our employees, Windows apps, databases, etc.”

“How are you using the cloud, if at all,” asked Vellante. “We’re a Google Apps customer, so we have our entire email/drive system out on the cloud. It’s been a learning curve, but we’ve had a good experience with the cloud,” answered Lefebvre. That was nearly three years ago, when Lefebvre recalls they were the first big healthcare customer of Google Apps.

Splunk 6

“There’s a lot of functionalities I’m looking forward to using,” declared Lefebvre. “I’ll be installing that as soon as I get back.”

Vellante wanted to know what was the most appealing feature but Lefebvre had a hard time deciding on one. “There really wasn’t one thing that stood out. Everything looked useful.”