Province Healthcare: Servers and Storage
Province Healthcare is a national chain of 21 non-urban hospitals.
Challenge
Province Healthcare was facing increased computing requirements with the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the growing demands of today’s healthcare information systems.
Solution
Already an IBM customer, Province knew their existing iSeries systems would not be able to meet the increasing demands, so they turned to the Genisys Group to roll out 11 new multi-terabyte systems. A larger 6 processor LPAR system located at the corporate headquarters would serve the corporate financial requirements and, with a standby partition, would cover the need to have a disaster recovery system in the event something should strike a hospital.
Genisys Group, well known for their LPAR expertise and rapid deployment techniques, had to operate under the constraint that hospitals are a 24 x 7 x 365 industry and that interruptions in the computer systems can affect patient care.
Genisys’s engineers migrated each site to the new systems with minimal impact to the facilities by utilizing an in-house developed hybrid upgrade process.
Results
In addition to supplying the platforms to meet the additional compliance demands, with the new systems in place, the hospitals saw a 75% reduction in their month-end processing schedule.
Province saw reduced overtime in the information systems department due to the faster systems. The implementation of LAN based consoles gave the on-call employees the flexibility of handling almost every situation from home, thereby reducing the need to drive into the facility when an IS emergency arose.
"We were on an accelerated schedule and with the System i being the hospital's primary system a clean fast upgrade was mandatory. After reviewing Genisys's LPAR expertise and proven track record on system rollouts the decision to select them for this project was a breeze. I am pleased to say all system conversions went in with minimal impact to the facilities. Obviously, we would make the same decision again."
- Gary Gamble, Province Healthcare, Director, Information Systems