Case Study: UZ Leuven achieves high-performance, scalable shared EPR and faster patient care with NetApp

UZ Leuven and NetApp mark a healthy, 20-year relationship built on trust

University Hospitals of Leuven (UZ Leuven) is a leading academic medical center in Belgium with five campuses, about 2,000+ beds, and 8,900 staff that also provides IT services through nexuzhealth to share a common electronic patient record (EPR) with other hospitals. Faced with rapidly growing patient data, aging systems in smaller partner hospitals, and the need to scale to thousands of concurrent users without sacrificing performance or availability, UZ Leuven needed a high-performance, highly available data platform to support nationwide EPR sharing and collaboration.

UZ Leuven deployed NetApp All Flash FAS and Data ONTAP to centralize and accelerate its EPR platform, cutting storage latency from roughly 100 ms to under 0.4 ms, delivering 99.999% availability, and absorbing nearly 1 PB of annual data growth. The solution enabled faster, automated cross-checks and analytics, supported many more virtual desktops (tripling deployments and improving VDI performance by ~100x), and scaled nexuzhealth to support dozens of hospitals—improving clinical decision-making, reducing redundant tests, and lowering overall IT TCO.

UZ Leuven

Reinoud Reynders

IT Infrastructure Director