Systems Management

03/18/17

This week I was given the task of charting out the overall run-times for a system that the hospital has running every day to discover possibly points where the system could be improved to run quicker. It was very new to me as I was handed a massive excel spreadsheet with start and stop times of many many different processes.

The specific system had to do with gathering different elements of patient data to feed into other systems, pulling records and clinical information.

At first I simply drew out a chart in excel to show the time it took for each process to complete over the time of day when it began. Some trends developed as expected, with most of them being consistent throughout the whole day, however there was a large peak for all applications around 6 am. I was informed this is because the systems go offline for a few hours then have to makeup the missed data when they restart at 6 am. I just then created a bit of a reusable sheet in excel to chart the same run times for any day whose data was inputted into the sheet. I used this to check over several days and noted the specific problem areas and reported it to my adviser.

It felt like I had really been able to help with a real issue and work to improve an application for the hospital. It also gave me an appreciation for what really goes on behind the scenes, thousands and thousands of different small processes that feed into one main objective.