Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that Unimed Grande Florianópolis, a branch of the Brazil's largest medical cooperative group, has chosen the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to accelerate innovation and deliver new digital touchpoints and services to healthcare patients across the country. Unimed Grande Florianópolis – known widely as Unimed Floripa - is a cooperative providing healthcare services within the Santa Catarina state in Brazil. It is the largest of its kind in the country, serving more than 220,000 people in 17 cities, across 20 hospitals, 270 clinics, 90 medical labs, and 1,700 medical doctors.

The healthcare system in Brazil was severely impacted by the demands from the pandemic and struggled to cope with the surge in admissions and demand for services. The cooperative needed to rethink the way it was delivering healthcare and accelerated its digital transformation plans to create new digital touchpoints for patients and extend the reach of healthcare provision. To do this it needed to modernize its existing technology environment to support the implementation of new projects, digitize patient records and simplify the sharing of critical data among different healthcare teams. Unimed Grande Florianópolis reimagined its IT around the HPE GreenLake platform to create a scalable, agile, high performance private cloud with a pay-per-use financial model.

HPE GreenLake delivers a single technology environment across all facets of care, from appointment management to patient record access. Its pay-per-use structure ensures that Unimed Grande Florianópolis and its service users get maximum value from their investment and maximum reliability from a single management interface, and a scalable unified solution. One example of a new way of working is Doctor-U, a network of telemedicine kiosks.

The kiosks, open 24/7, enable patients to contact a doctor and register a range of health indicators, including BMI, blood pressure and heart rate. All interactions with Doctor-U are logged on a patient's health record. Many of the tasks are conducted via an AI-powered virtual doctor.

The plan is to roll out the kiosks state-wide, helping relieve the burden on medical staff, and as a triage for more serious complaints. Another example is a patient app providing access to medical records and appointments, so that medical teams have access to the information they need to work remotely. In addition to the cost-optimization of pay-per-use, the new environment has also significantly reduced electrical power and space requirements to further reduce overheads at a time when cost is a significant factor in healthcare delivery.

HPE worked in partnership with HPE authorized partner, Sercompe, to build the system tailored to the unique needs of Brazil's healthcare system. The HPE GreenLake platform runs VMware and is delivered through a combination of HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen 10 servers, HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE FlexFabric 5710 Switches.