Industry Focus HEALTH
systems, this has helped the company to become the strategic partner of choice for all of the trust’s mission critical data and storage management requirements.
The second phase of the project involved the deployment of FileStore EHR which has enabled the trust to fulfil its data recovery obligations as well as ensure records are indexed, de-duplicated and encrypted so they are in keeping with data protection and privacy regulations. Part of Rotherham’s vision was to create a paperless hospital environment. The BridgeHead systems help take away the problem for healthcare professionals of how to efficiently manage and control the proliferation of data that will accompany the switch from paper-based to digitised records. FileStore EHR ensures records are optimised (e.g. through compression, de-duplication etc.), indexed, and made fully searchable before being stored so that data can be accessed by hospital staff efficiently and cost effectively.
Phase two has also included the implementation of MailStore which has enabled the trust to manage and archive email content for over 1,500 of its Microsoft Exchange users so that computer systems can run faster whilst dramatically freeing up storage space and reducing storage costs. Critically, the deployment of MailStore will also free up staff time away from managing email so they can focus their efforts on patient care.
Currently BridgeHead is working on the third phase of the project which includes the deployment of its solutions to further support the management and protection of data specifically around clinical services as well as the rollout of MailStore to an additional 2,000 users. MailStore will also help the trust manage its planned upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2010.
“At Rotherham, our mission is to act as a spearhead to prove that technology can work and deliver benefits, both for the hospital and more importantly for the improvement in the delivery of patient care. This is why we are committed to developing a consolidated infrastructure with future-proof solutions – strategic partners such as BridgeHead Software have become key to achieving that objective,” added Brown.
Project UNITY
CHRISTUS Health is an integrated healthcare network, comprised of 42 hospitals and a wide range of other health care services in over 70 communities throughout Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Monterrey and Saltillo, Mexico. It employs over 25,000 people with annual patient service revenues of $2.4 billion. Its IT organization employs over 400 people who support 30,000 end users, 1,500 servers, 15,000 desktop devices, and 600 host based applications.
Over the past seven years CHRISTUS has grown substantially, both organically and through mergers and acquisitions. From an IT perspective, incorporating the increasing number of hospital systems, into a single business and IT infrastructure has been a significant challenge. One of the key problems was the complexity involved in supporting a geographically dispersed
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infrastructure and user base with different and isolated Health Information Systems (HIS), data storage equipment, software and administrative practices and procedures.
To address this challenge, CHRISTUS Health has implemented Project UNITY, a comprehensive IT strategy aimed at replacing and ‘unifying’ the various disparate HIS systems located at each of its member hospitals into a single, consolidated, centrally hosted healthcare information system to store, maintain and automate electronic patient records, business applications and highly sensitive clinical data.
The organization has standardized on the MEDITECH HIS, with a successful roll out of 99 MEDITECH servers over a two year timeframe. These are located within CHRISTUS’ single primary data center in San Antonio, along with its underlying storage technology platforms (high end EMC DMX Storage Area Networks), and networking infrastructure.
As part of Project UNITY, CHRISTUS wanted to create a new standard for operational and disaster recovery, and offsite data protection which would allow it to routinely create point-in-time copies of its entire HIS environment. This needed to be retained on different tiers of storage available for recovery to combat a variety of failures.
“Rapid and unobtrusive backup and disaster recovery were key priorities,” explained Mark Middleton, Director of IT Infrastructure at CHRISTUS. “ Full time data availability and access to IT services were critical requirements, and the automated billing, inventory and management of patient healthcare information needed to be available round the clock.”
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