Trust is the foundation of customer relationships

Mutual trust as a foundation
There are few sectors where relationships are so strongly built on trust as in healthcare. This obviously applies to the patient-doctor relationship, or that between a practitioner and a patient’s relatives. The same is also true for the trust that we all, as a society, have in the actual treatment and technology used.

Digitisation in healthcare
If you look at how digitisation has evolved in healthcare, it would be impossible to compare the IT environment to, say, twenty years ago. It is hard to believe that, in those days, patients walked from one counter to another with their plastic punch cards, with physical documents being shuffled back and forth endlessly! This digital transformation is still going on, and a high degree of mutual trust is essential for it: if professionals in a healthcare facility can’t rely on the continuity of the digital environment, or if they can’t be sure that their supplier will be ready straight away in the event of an emergency – just as a surgeon needs to be immediately available, for example – the digitisation process simply won’t get off the ground. Therefore, the partnership between healthcare facilities and a supplier such as Dell Technologies has grown during years of intensive contact. Building a relationship starts with gaining trust, as this provides the necessary room for cooperation and growth.

‘Better together’
An example is UZ Brussel, a University Hospital in the Belgian capital. In this case, the hospital required expansion of its use of virtualisation solutions while, at the same time, there was a great need for the performance of the IT environment to be improved. We at Dell Technologies were fortunately able to respond with servers equipped with AMD EPYC processors. Specifically, this involved the Dell PowerEdge R7515 and Dell PowerEdge R7525.

A much stronger performance of the medical applications was the result, in combination with a more modern VDI for the users. We are pleased to say that this success has led to a continued partnership on other solutions, such as in the field of storage. Thus, based on the good relationship, it is a case of ‘better together’.

Ghent University long term client
The same goes for another client that exemplifies the way in which supplier and client can become partners. Ghent University has been a long term client of Dell Technologies. One of their projects related to a renewed storage and backup environment and, at the time, they were looking to move away from tape as a data carrier and make the switch to disk systems. In practical terms, we helped them out by developing a Dell Data Domain (and Networker) in combination with a Dell Isilon solution.

Impact of the pandemic
The last year and a half, of course, had a major impact on both organisations. The university had to very quickly switch to online teaching, while the staff at the hospital who didn’t have to be physically present at the facility found themselves all of a sudden working from home. However, the VDI solution that had been previously rolled out made this transition possible. Now, as the situation we’re in has changed, organisations are looking into how lessons learned can be put into practice in the future. An organisation like Dell Technologies was already used to working hybrid. However, for healthcare and educational institutions, this was a mind shift. Here, too, it is a question of trust: trust that employees and students will do their jobs. But also trust that staff and students are able to do their work with reliable technology. This is what we at Dell Technologies stand for.

References, full read
UZ Brussel: https://www.amd.com/en/case-studies/uz-brussel
University of Ghent: https://www.computable.be/artikel/nieuws/datamanagement/7161453/5440850/dell-verzorgt-backups-van-universiteit-gent.html 

About the Author: Jurgen Weeck