My current job - Operations Analyst at NEHS Digital
Posted: Sat May 22, 2021 4:34 am
So, where do I work, and what exactly is the job that I do ?
Well, I've been working for a company called NEHS Digital for almost 9 whole years now.
I suppose that the closest english translation to the job title that I have is " Operations Analyst ".
That short introduction means that I usually work in an office and have a desk that looks like this :
However, due to the current Covid 19 pandemic, for the past year I've been working from home :
So what does NEHS Digital do... ?
NEHS Digital, which used to be called Acetiam, is first are formost a medical software company, but also a medical platform service provider. All of the core products are based around the DICOM medical imaging standard, and relate to various needs during the different patient pathways taken during the care process. We develop software for basic needs like a DICOM image viewer for doctors, automatically printing paper blooklets and burning CDs or DVDs for the patients to take their images home, capturing live video feeds from operations, converting standard images and documents to the DICOM format along with importing CDs and DVDs to be archived on centralised PACS systems, to more advanced systems that store and transfer images between hospitals and also to and from specialists around the world, web distribution for hospitals to digitally hand out images to patients, and web uploading for patients to send images to the hospitals. What we do is not only image based, we also privide radiological information systems, radiological analysis and reports from remote radiologists provided by us, amongst many other things. So basically, if you've ever had a CT or MRI scan, X-Ray, ultrasound, coelioscopy, ureteroscopy, all those kinds of things... the images or reports may have been through one of our systems. That is of course, speaking for the french hospitals... as far as I know, only the printing and CD/DVD burning systems have been sold to the NHS in the UK via Rothband, or to the HSE in Ireland via McKesson (now Change Healthcare).
And so what does my job actually involve ?
Well, as stated before, these days I'm a level 3 Operations Analyst. Going from level 0 to level 3, you've got the hotline that answers the customer calls, the level 1 technicians that follow written procedures for common tasks and problems, if the level 1 techs can't manage it, the level 2 techs take over and actually do troubleshooting and diagnostics, they scratch their head and their arse for a while and chat amonsgt themselves whilst searching through the knowledgebase and Google, and if they can't manage to find a solution or lets say if there's a new system to be installed that quite complicated, then the level 3 gets called, which consists mainly of engineers/developers and DevSecOps admins.
On a day-to-day basis, I'm mainly involved in managing our various private cloud infrastructures. This can be anything from monitoring, analysing and adapting the VMWare VSphere's hosts and datastores, deploying and configuring new virtual machines of various types and sizes (CentOS, RedHat, Ubuntu, Windows, etc.), managing firewall/nat rules and IPsec VPN interconnects. As an example, at one datacenter, we have roughly 2500 GHz of CPU available, 6.4 TB of RAM, and 450 TB of storage. That's not counting what we have at at least 3 other datacenters, and also what's hosted internally at the office on dozens of physical servers. The majority of the servers I manage are used for the national image transfer network (there are also regional only ones that are hosted by the hospitals themselves), the teleradiology systems, the video consultation platform, Monaco's healthcare portal, and one of 3 national Covid 19 vaccination platforms (Keldoc).
Apart from that, I work on automation scripts using Ansible in order to roll out modifications and updates to upto 450 servers at a time, follow the latest security alerts and updates, and I also provide level 3 support for the level 2 support team, mainly dealing with problems with installations directly at the hospitals (issues with virtualisation, proxys and firewalls, SSL certificats, IPDiva VPN, etc.) and also from time to time support for the CD/DVD robotic systems. Sometimes I also have to do internal (level 2 techs) or external (radiologists, doctors, technicians, it department) training, depending on the needs... and writing documentation for our knowledgebase as well. I've probably forgotten a few things, but that should give you the general jist of it. I usually work from 9am to 6pm, but I'm quite often asked to do updates at 9pm or 5am, or I simply just end up working late for whatever reason... In a sense I'm quite lucky to be given a realitively flexiable timetable and almost total autonomy, in the eyes of the boss, as long as the work is done, all's good... so all in all I'm quite happy in the job I'm doing, technically speaking it's very interesting and I'm always learning new things, and my work colleagues are good fun, I just wish it payed a bit more, lol...
Right, now that I've bored you all to death, I think I'll end that there... maybe I'll add some more photos after...
Well, I've been working for a company called NEHS Digital for almost 9 whole years now.
I suppose that the closest english translation to the job title that I have is " Operations Analyst ".
That short introduction means that I usually work in an office and have a desk that looks like this :
However, due to the current Covid 19 pandemic, for the past year I've been working from home :
So what does NEHS Digital do... ?
NEHS Digital, which used to be called Acetiam, is first are formost a medical software company, but also a medical platform service provider. All of the core products are based around the DICOM medical imaging standard, and relate to various needs during the different patient pathways taken during the care process. We develop software for basic needs like a DICOM image viewer for doctors, automatically printing paper blooklets and burning CDs or DVDs for the patients to take their images home, capturing live video feeds from operations, converting standard images and documents to the DICOM format along with importing CDs and DVDs to be archived on centralised PACS systems, to more advanced systems that store and transfer images between hospitals and also to and from specialists around the world, web distribution for hospitals to digitally hand out images to patients, and web uploading for patients to send images to the hospitals. What we do is not only image based, we also privide radiological information systems, radiological analysis and reports from remote radiologists provided by us, amongst many other things. So basically, if you've ever had a CT or MRI scan, X-Ray, ultrasound, coelioscopy, ureteroscopy, all those kinds of things... the images or reports may have been through one of our systems. That is of course, speaking for the french hospitals... as far as I know, only the printing and CD/DVD burning systems have been sold to the NHS in the UK via Rothband, or to the HSE in Ireland via McKesson (now Change Healthcare).
And so what does my job actually involve ?
Well, as stated before, these days I'm a level 3 Operations Analyst. Going from level 0 to level 3, you've got the hotline that answers the customer calls, the level 1 technicians that follow written procedures for common tasks and problems, if the level 1 techs can't manage it, the level 2 techs take over and actually do troubleshooting and diagnostics, they scratch their head and their arse for a while and chat amonsgt themselves whilst searching through the knowledgebase and Google, and if they can't manage to find a solution or lets say if there's a new system to be installed that quite complicated, then the level 3 gets called, which consists mainly of engineers/developers and DevSecOps admins.
On a day-to-day basis, I'm mainly involved in managing our various private cloud infrastructures. This can be anything from monitoring, analysing and adapting the VMWare VSphere's hosts and datastores, deploying and configuring new virtual machines of various types and sizes (CentOS, RedHat, Ubuntu, Windows, etc.), managing firewall/nat rules and IPsec VPN interconnects. As an example, at one datacenter, we have roughly 2500 GHz of CPU available, 6.4 TB of RAM, and 450 TB of storage. That's not counting what we have at at least 3 other datacenters, and also what's hosted internally at the office on dozens of physical servers. The majority of the servers I manage are used for the national image transfer network (there are also regional only ones that are hosted by the hospitals themselves), the teleradiology systems, the video consultation platform, Monaco's healthcare portal, and one of 3 national Covid 19 vaccination platforms (Keldoc).
Apart from that, I work on automation scripts using Ansible in order to roll out modifications and updates to upto 450 servers at a time, follow the latest security alerts and updates, and I also provide level 3 support for the level 2 support team, mainly dealing with problems with installations directly at the hospitals (issues with virtualisation, proxys and firewalls, SSL certificats, IPDiva VPN, etc.) and also from time to time support for the CD/DVD robotic systems. Sometimes I also have to do internal (level 2 techs) or external (radiologists, doctors, technicians, it department) training, depending on the needs... and writing documentation for our knowledgebase as well. I've probably forgotten a few things, but that should give you the general jist of it. I usually work from 9am to 6pm, but I'm quite often asked to do updates at 9pm or 5am, or I simply just end up working late for whatever reason... In a sense I'm quite lucky to be given a realitively flexiable timetable and almost total autonomy, in the eyes of the boss, as long as the work is done, all's good... so all in all I'm quite happy in the job I'm doing, technically speaking it's very interesting and I'm always learning new things, and my work colleagues are good fun, I just wish it payed a bit more, lol...
Right, now that I've bored you all to death, I think I'll end that there... maybe I'll add some more photos after...
