Connecting Health Care
By Pure, Pamela J; Gash, Debe
WECOME TO CONNECTING HEALTH CARE
Vision. Commitment. Trust. Accountability. These qualities define successful partnerships, especially when using IT to drive health care transformation. Whether your goal is enhanced clinical excellence or improved business performance, it’s essential to build both the internal and external relationships needed to support your initiatives.
For over a decade, McKesson and InSight have partnered with organizations of all sizes and shapes on health care IT initiatives, both large and small. We recognize the value of collaboration-both between system users, and among users themselves. By providing an independent forum to share best practices, InSight is equipping its members to lead the industry in patient safety, revenue cycle management, physician adoption of IT and more. McKesson shares that commitment and supports InSight members through feedback sessions, special-interest groups and annual product updates.
Our partnership doesn’t end there. Through V^sup 3^, InSight and McKesson are collaborating with Intel, Dell and Oracle to enhance IT value while reducing the cost of ownership. In Connecting Health Care, read the profiles on Peninsula Regional Medical Center, St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System and Solaris Health System to learn how these providers are improving system reliability and performance, controlling costs and, ultimately, making health care safer.
Pamela J. Pure
President, McKesson Provider Technologies, Atlanta
Debe Gosh
VP Chief Information Officer, SaM Luke’s Health System, Lee’s Summit, Mo.
1 CASE STUDY | PENINSULA REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER AND INTEL
ARCHITECTURE-BASED DIGITAL HOSPITAL
BACKGROUND
Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Salisbury, Md., is well-known for quality health care services. In the 1970s, PRMC was one of the first facilities to pioneer heart surgery. Today, PRMC has 371 patient beds, a very busy emergency department, and a large oncology and cardiac center. In 2006, HealthGrades Inc. rated the provider “Five Stars” for cardiac services, vascular surgery, joint replacement surgery, stroke and prostate surgery. In addition, Hospitals & Health Networks magazine recognized PRMC as one of the Most Wired Small amd Rural hospitals in the United States for three consecutive years.
GOING DIGITAL
“Ten years ago we committed to become a digital hospital,” says Ray Adkins, chief information officer for PRMC. McKesson became part of PRMCs plan for achieving this goal, starting with the deployment of the core hospital information system.”We’ve added additional McKesson applications over the years for electronic medical records, online clinical documentation, bar-coded medication administration, and more.” Becoming a digital hospital places a lot of responsibility on the IT team and the systems. “We’re 85 percent paperless and the staff relies entirely on the technology throughout the care process,” says Adkins. “So, there’s a great emphasis on assured availability and reliability:’
RELIABLE SYSTEMS
PRMC recently migrated its clinical infrastructure to a new platform based on McKessoris Horizon Architecture(TM) solution using Grade 10g* Real Application Clusters, Red Hat Enterprise Linux* open source operating system, and Dual-Core Intel Xeon processorbased HP Proliant* DL380 servers. The new technology gives PRMC the necessary scalability and reliability at a greatly reduced cost compared with UNIX* and RISC-based alternatives. “We saved more than 60 percent in hardware and software costs compared with traditional high- availability options,” says Adkins. “Moving the clinical database off the UNIX system gave us more capacity for other uses for that system, extending its usable life. This has enabled us to maximize our current investments while taking advantage of newer technologies.”
Grade’s RAC technology runs PRMCs clinical database on a duster of four dual-processor servers. If one server goes down, the rest of the duster keeps information services available. The duster is separated into two data centers with two servers in each data center, providing PRMC a high level of backup and disaster recovery. “Between the RAC implementation and the Intel-based servers, we can continue to provide information services to the staff during upgrades and respond to issues much more rapidly. And adding capacity means we just expand the cluster,” comments Brad Taylor, manager of technical services at PRMC. “We’re a couple hours from any major city. Relying on outside support for proprietary hardware has a negative impact on our ability to maintain highly available systems. We’re much more efficient thi sway.”
ON THE LEADING EDGE
“Staying on the leading edge fits with our organization’s consistent, long-term vision of clinical excellence supported by information technology,” says Adkins. “The greater our capacity to continue our investment in systems capable of supporting increasingly complex care delivery processes, the greater the assurance to our patients that they will continue to receive the highest quality care in the safest setting possible. McKessoris systems and Intel architecturebased servers have helped us meet our goals.”
Copyright 2006 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. This paper is for informational purposes only. INTEL MAKES WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Intel, the Intel logo, and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Horizon Architecture is a trademark of McKesson Information Solutions LLC. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
2 CASE STUDY | SOLARIS HEALTH SYSTEM AND DELL
STANDARDS-BASED TECHNOLOGY
BACKGROUND
Technology innovation is a driving force behind Solaris Health System, Edison, N.J., an organization that takes pride in providing quality and compassionate health care to the residents of Central New Jersey. The health system comprises multiple facilities including two acute care hospitals, a neuroscience institute, a rehabilitation institute and three long-term care facilities among other specialized centers, schools and programs.
Just as each patient has different needs, Solaris requires technology that can respond to the diverse needs of health care providers. With more than 6,000 employees to support, 3,500 desktop and notebook client systems, and a large server infrastructure, Solaris’ IT staff of 65 relies on technology that is dependable and easy-tomanage. Yet some solutions, particularly enterprise-scale servers running proprietary operating systems, can be expensive, complicated to manage and difficult to maintain.
COMBINING MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS
Solaris Health System is enhancing its technology capabilities while making the most of its budget. The IT team has implemented several McKesson Horizon Clinicals applications running on a standards-based Linux operating system instead of an expensive proprietary operating environment Solaris will expand its technology functionality by adding more Linux-based McKesson applications throughout its facilities.
Supported by the standards-based compatibility of scalable Dell(TM) PowerEdge(TM) Servers, powered by Intel Xeon processors, the solution has resulted in major savings for Solaris compared with alternative platfbrms. “The McKesson solution running on Dell hardware costs significantly less than a proprietary infrastructure while still delivering high performance,” says Miroslav Belote, director of information systems for Solaris.
Dell collaborated with McKesson and Intel to migrate many of McKesson’s UNDWRISChosted clinical applications to Linux. Dell developed configurations that support McKesson applications on a Linux operating system and then delivered prestaged hardware that was implemented easily into Solaris’ environment. Intel tuned McKessoris applications to maximize performance on its technology, and McKesson configured its applications to function specifically in a Linux environment.
“Information technology enables forwardacting health care providers such as Solaris Health System to increase the quality of care while reducing costs,” says Pat Perry, vice president and general manager of health care IT in Intel’s Digital Health Group. “Clinical applications running on standards-based servers powered by Intel Xeon processors provide cost-effective, scalable and reliable solutions.”
BETTER PATIENT CARE
As a result of the collaboration between Dell, Intel and McKesson, Solaris has an efficient, cost-effective solution that can handle a wide variety of crucial functions. “We use McKesson’s interdisciplinary clinical documentation solution to improve the consistency and accuracy of care delivery,” says Karen Fischbach, manager of infrastructure support at Solaris. “We also use McKesson’s document imaging and scheduling applications, which make it much easier to manage documents and schedule surgical cases.”
Additionally, the new architecture is easy for the IT team to manage, which results in savings both in terms of costs and resources. “The solution is simple to use and maintain,” explains Bill Thorpe, system engineer. “And Dell provides exceptional service and support”
Solaris has found that by turning to standards-based technology, it has the resources it needs to provide high-quality patient care without sacrificing its budget.
The Dell products in this case study are not medical devices and are not listed underUL60601. As a result, they must not be used within six feet of a patient or allowed to directly or indirectly contact a patient. Products in this brochure not made by Dell are not listed under L160601 unless otherwise stated by the third-party manufacturer. For more information, please visit www.dell.com/ health care/certification. Dell cannot be responsible for errors in typography, photography or omissions. Dell, the Dell logo and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. Horizon Clinicals is a registered trademark of McKesson Information Solutions LLC. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited. 2006 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden.
3 CASE STUDY | ST. LUKE’S EPISCOPAL HEALTH SYSTEM AND ORACLE
ENSURING CLINICAL DATA IS AVAILABLE
CHALLENGES
St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System has provided compassionate health care to Houstonians for almost five decades from its location in the heart of the Texas Medical Center. Founded in 1954 by the Episcopal Diocese ofTexas, today St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital employs the latest technology to help deliver the safest and highest- quality health care to patients from the Houston metro area and around the world.
Like most health care institutions with increasingly constrained budgets in today’s highly regulated, competitive environment, St. Luke’s sought innovative ways to reduce IT costs while preserving the reliability and performance of its systems. A decision point came when the two UNIX Symmetric Multiprocessing servers (one for production and the other a standby for failover) used for McKesson clinical applications reached the end of their hardware life cycle. St. Luke’s faced the prospect of purchasing new SMP hardware to maintain the expected level of service for its clinicians. This would be a major capital expense.
An additional consideration was that Houston’s coastal climate attracts severe storms, making disaster recovery essential for uninterrupted access to clinical data. While St. Luke’s was capable of failing over its applications and database, the failovers were not seamless, and recovery required periodic testing that took the clinical application infrastructure offline.
THE SOLUTION
St. Luke’s has collaborated with McKesson for many years to provide innovative, cost-effective technologies that help clinicians to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of patient care. The provider has made significant investments in clinical solutions such as provider order entry/clinical decision support, pharmacy management, nursing documentation and medical imaging systems as well as a physician portal.
With McKesson’s advice, St Luke’s implemented a considerably more cost-effective deployment based on Oracle Database 10g and Real Application Ousters running on Linux. The new deployment allowed St Luke’s to use less expensive hardware for the database-a duster of Dell(TM) 2850 Linux servers.’Orade Real Application Clusters on Linux is absolutely key to reducing total cost of ownership,” says Amy Thorpe, director of clinical applications for St. Luke’s. “Cutting our hardware costs by one-third stretched our health care IT dollars and allowed us to provide critical functionality at a much reduced cost. We’re protected from individual server Mure, plus we now have enhanced disaster recovery capabilities.”
The McKesson applications run on a duster of four Dell(TM) 2850 Linux servers, with the duster separated in two distinct data renters for additional protection in the event of a natural disaster. Should a server fail, others in the duster automatically take over, so users don’t experience any unforeseen downtime.
The new system provides St Luke’s with the foundation for extending the system into a larger Grade grid, adding low-cost servers and additional storage on demand. The clustered Orade database appears as a single instance of Orade Database 10g to users, and the same maintenance tools and practices can be used on the entire duster. Workloads can be managed dynamically by adding or relinquishing nodes based on business processing needs.
“Moving to Orade Real Application Clusters on Linux has given us high availability for about 65 percent less than what a traditional implementation would have cost,” says Kay Carr, chief information officer for St. Luke’s. “This improved availability for our patient care systems also positions us to have zero-downtime upgrades for system maintenance.”
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company for more information about Oracle, visit its Wfeb site at www.oracle.com.
McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 16th on me FORTUNE 500, is a health care services and information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality health care by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care, for more information, go to www.mckesson.com.
Copyright Health Forum Inc. Winter 2007
(c) 2007 Hospitals & Health Networks. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.