From improving patient care at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to helping physicians make more informed treatment decisions based on historical data, IBM’s Watson has proven to be a boon for the healthcare industry. Albeit not nearly as well known beyond the traditional enterprise, the company’s SAN Volume Controller is also making a difference for healthcare providers nationwide.

Inland Northwest Health Services has implemented SVC with IBM System x servers and Storwize and DS8000 storage systems to increase the reliability of its electronic health record services. The non-profit IT provider serves 40 hospitals and 750 physicians in the northwest United States, and boasts an annual growth of 25 percent.

IBM’s solutions have helped INHS virtualize 95 percent of its 1,200 servers, reduce data center space requirements by 28 percent, and double performance for end-users.

“The core application we provide to our clients is a comprehensive system covering a full range of healthcare activities — hospital operations, admission of patients, pharmacy orders, lab services, and patient clinical information,” said Chad Skidmore, the director of INHS. “Because it covers so many critical aspects affecting patient care, we needed a cloud solution that could provide the highest quality of service, and the performance of the technology IBM is providing is just amazing.”

IBM’s cloud strategy spans multiple industries. The company published the INHS case study just days after allying with Deutsche Telekom to make its Worklight mobile app platform available via carrier’s Developer Garden service. The partnership aims to make Worklight accessible for small and midsized businesses that don’t have the resources to deploy an on-premise mobile solution. The Worklight-enhanced Developer Garden platform lets users integrate geolocation capabilities into their HTML5, hybrid and native apps.