Prader-Willi Syndrome Association Taiwan (PWSA Taiwan)

Background

In 2001, with the assistance of the Rare Diseases Foundation and several specialists, 25 families of patients with the rare disease Prader-Willi Syndrome met together to form the "Prader-Willi Syndrome Patient Friends.” As more and more families joined, members felt the challenges faced by families were becoming complex and burdensome. To provide more resources and further support families of patients, the "Prader-Willi Syndrome Association" was officially established in 2005. Over the past decade, the association has provided care, counseling, resource connections, and organized various supportive activities. Currently, it serves over 230 families of patients across Taiwan.
Learn more: PWSA Taiwan

Challenges

As of 2023, the association has three service locations across Taiwan, including the headquarters and three PWSA workshops in the north and south. PWSA workshops are tailored to the specific needs of Prader-Willi Syndrome in the form of professional development, therapeutic arrangement, and courses during weekdays. The aim is to assist patients in staying healthy, stabilizing emotions, learning appropriate interpersonal interaction through fixed schedule and structured service strategies, while also allowing parents to take a brief break.

The service locations in the north and south are distant from each other. Daily service records, assessment reports, and other data are scattered across multiple computers in various locations. Additionally, frontline teachers are busy leading on-site courses and activities, making it difficult to centralize and return service data to the headquarters for storage and processing. When staff changes, it becomes a challenge to pass on valuable care experience and service data. In addition, while public cloud services are widely available, due to the sensitive nature of personal service data of patients, it is quite challenging to ensure secure access. Therefore, it is not the preferred choice from a data security perspective. Another option is the traditional point-to-point VPN, but it is complex to configure, and using it is relatively difficult for teachers without an IT background. Therefore, the association began to seek a cross-location file management approach that is both secure and easy to use.

Solution

QNAP provided PWSA Taiwan with the QHora-301W router together with the QuWAN intelligent network bandwidth optimization solution to achieve multi-location networking, centralized file storage management, and data sharing. QHora-301W supports advanced Wi-Fi 6 wireless technology and 10GbE wired network connections. Its most notable feature is the provision of enterprise-grade SD-WAN Mesh VPN. This enables association staff to rapidly deploy multi-location regional networks through the cloud and simplifies the complex configuration of VPN deployment.

QuWAN Mesh VPN’s Automated Connection Configuration Technology
QuWAN utilizes its advanced virtualization technology to automatically configure all external connections and significantly simplifies the setup process for Mesh VPN multi-location networking. Staff of the association only needs to bind the QHora-301W router to the QuWAN Orchestrator central management platform, and the system automatically completes the connection configuration for Mesh VPN. After binding QuWAN Orchestrator, the connections between all branches' devices will be as if they are in the same internal network, thus ensuring smoother and more secure data storage, transmission, and backup.

Hybrid Backup Sync
Hybrid Backup Sync Hybrid Backup Sync is a license-free file backup, synchronization, and restoration solution provided by QNAP. It ensures that the association’s data can be securely backed up on QNAP NAS at the headquarters and branch locations. QNAP recommends scheduling automatic backup tasks for daily data backups. With the networking functionality of QuWAN Mesh VPN, remote backup becomes extremely simple. You just need to specify a NAS within the organizational network as the backup destination to easily complete off-site data backup.

Result

After adopting the QNAP QHora-301W and QuWAN solutions for a one-time multi-location network deployment, teachers in various PWSA locations can easily store service records in the shared NAS folder on their desktops and immediately complete the process of file consolidation, storage, and backup. The headquarters can also instantly share data with each branch. Now, social workers and teachers can focus more on serving patients. The consolidation of data at various locations not only allows the association, physicians, and parents to better understand the care needs of each patient, but also provides the association with more comprehensive data for continuous optimization and promotion of patient services. This creates a more supportive environment for patients and their families.