Preparing for ARRA HITECH Readiness With a Tiered Information Infrastructure
Case Study: WellStar Health System, Atlanta
WellStar Health System—a not-for-profit system in Atlanta comprised of five hospitals and a 400-physician group practice—is dedicated to providing world-class healthcare for a community of 600,000. Like other health systems, WellStar was challenged with the increasing costs and resources associated with medical records retention and timely retrieval of patient information. As the health system implements computerized provider order entry (CPOE), the organization needs to provide the highest levels of availability to support 24/7 care delivery.
When Stephen Edge came on board two years ago as chief enterprise architect, he realized that some systems and processes in place were not meeting the health system’s needs. Specifically, he needed to build a strategy that incorporated requirements for high availability that aligned with clinical service needs. Only 10 percent of the clinical applications and systems within the organization were attached to the storage area network, which increased time to diagnosis problems.
Edge and his team worked to create an information infrastructure strategy to enable high-availability, business continuity and fast record recall that would enable optimum patient care delivery as clinical applications were added. “The ability to make a decision in our business is critical in providing the best patient care possible,” Edge says. “For us to improve on information access and fast decision-making, we needed to deploy an infrastructure that could store, manage and protect our growing patient information.”
To meet their newly defined objectives, Wellstar implemented two EMC Symmetrix DMX-4’s that provide high performance, information availability, and built-in information-centric security to meet primary data storage requirements including production and disaster recovery.
They also added EMC RecoverPoint for continuous data protection and remote replication for on-demand protection and recovery at any point in time. “When you look at the number of potential systems we have, over 400 applications, we needed a system that would scale as our organization grew,” Edge says. And looking toward projected growth in patient data and images over the next few years, “the EMC Symmetrix DMX4 is a solution we can leverage for years to come as more electronic care processes are moved online,” he adds.
Wellstar also made a strategic decision to use EMC Centera as their foundational platform to archive medical records, images and financial information. “The hybrid approach of using optical, tape and paper files with multiple disparate applications made it very time-consuming for users to access and locate files and information,” Edge notes. “Now WellStar has about 100 TBs of archived information, so our clinicians can easily access electronic medical records and radiological and cardiology images. By archiving to Centera, we’ve been able to allocate less primary storage which has helped us save cost and keep the most important data at the finger tips of our users. By investing in EMC and Centera, we can focus on one active archiving system and make sure our other application vendors tie to the system which has allowed us to save significant costs. ”
Solid infrastructure will help Wellstar move toward the new ARRA HITECH focus on electronic clinical applications. “The more a health system integrates PHI [protected health information] electronically, the more the clinical staff depends upon them. This shift creates a huge dependency upon high-availability and business continuity so that if an event occurs, clinicians can continue to provide care,” he says. “This is all accomplished in a 24/7 environment that continues to further leverage EMRs and CPOE to provide world-class healthcare in a cost-effective manner.”