Case Study: St. Luke's Hospital achieves 30% faster EMR response and submillisecond storage latency with NetApp hybrid flash systems

St. Luke’s Hospital More Efficient Healthcare, Flash-Enabled EMR

St. Luke’s Hospital, a 493‑bed not‑for‑profit near St. Louis, depends on Cerner Millennium and eClinicalWorks EMRs to deliver timely patient care across its hospital and 35 physician practices. Growing workloads created database I/O bottlenecks and latency spikes that slowed access to critical patient and medication information, increased help‑desk calls, and threatened the hospital’s goal of near‑100% uptime.

St. Luke’s deployed a NetApp hybrid flash FAS8040 cluster (clustered Data ONTAP, Flash Cache) and moved the EMR applications and their Oracle/SQL databases to flash‑based SAN aggregates. The change cut database I/O latency tenfold to consistent sub‑millisecond levels, made EMRs respond ~30% faster, improved nightly batch job performance about 5x (from ~20 to ~4 hours), reduced help‑desk volume, freed IT staff for strategic work, and placed the hospital among the top 5% of on‑premises Cerner deployments while enabling scalable growth.

St. Luke’s Hospital

Scott Holtswarth

Director, Information Services