CASE STUDY

HCA Innovates at Scale
with SearchStax Cloud

james-simcock

If we didn’t bring in SearchStax, we would have had to re-architect our entire search solution. SearchStax shaved at least a month of development time by working with us to fit into our existing architecture.

James Simcock | Head of Digital
HCA Healthcare UK

About

HCA is the largest private healthcare provider in the world, and HCA Healthcare UK is the largest provider of privately funded healthcare in the UK. Since 1968, HCA has followed the philosophy of putting patients first and provides compassionate care to patients with services ranging from clinical research, primary care, outpatient and day-case treatment.

Situation

HCA had used and managed Solr for customized search in the legacy environment which included Sitecore, WordPress and other CMS solutions for their 146 different facilities. HCA managed Solr on their own, but the deployment severely limited their ability to deploy new code or make changes and was not compatible with the planned new environment.

HCA consolidated on the Sitecore platform for content management and needed a high availability and robust Solr search solution for their new environment. In addition, HCA wanted to build a strong foundation that was future proofed and would support a planned suite of fundamentally enabling changes including virtual consultations, digital registration, telemedicine and patient-facing functional elements.

Solution

HCA’s solution started with a fresh installation of Sitecore 9.3 using the Azure platform as a service replicated across two Azure data centers in different regions. Working with SearchStax and a short project timeline, SearchStax and HCA implemented the SearchStax Cloud hosted Solr solution in less than two weeks.

HCA’s production SearchStax Cloud instance includes Platinum support and warm disaster recovery along with two smaller deployments for UAT and Development testing.

Results

SearchStax exceeded HCA’s expectations and compressed their implementation timeline by moving from an initial discovery call to contract negotiations to project kick-off within a two week period.

Coming into the project at the last minute, SearchStax was able to quickly implement Solr — and HCA didn’t have to re-architect the planned search solution which saved at least a month of development time.

Solr is deeply integrated into the new Sitecore environment and the SearchStax Cloud will make it easier to adopt changes in the future. In addition to saving a significant amount of development time, the Sitecore and SearchStax implementation gives the team the confidence and assurance needed to move forward with their planned changes to delivering innovative healthcare services to meet future patient and customer needs.

Read the HCA Blog post for additional details on their implementation of SearchStax Cloud.

Product

Cloud

Platform

Sitecore

Cloud Provider

Microsoft Azure

Location

EMEA

Industry

Healthcare