2009

iSOFT consolidates server structure in Halle

iSOFT, a leading supplier of healthcare IT systems, has announced the conclusion of a contract regarding the implementation of a virtualisation project with St. Elisabeth and St. Barbara Hospital in Halle. This agreement provides for the redundant consolidation of iSOFT's Patient Management  hospital information system (HIS), the laboratory system (LIS) and the radiology system (RIS) on high availability VM servers. In addition, a centralised backup and storage solution was integrated into the IT landscape. By implementing these measures, the hospital in Halle has created an efficient, high availability infrastructure. Operation and maintenance costs have been reduced due to the merger of all the necessary applications on two virtual servers. Furthermore, additional cost savings were achieved by cutting power consumption, thus significantly reducing the total IT expenditure while increasing performance. Another incidental benefit is that the reduced heat generation and power consumption also help protect the environment.

These projects became necessary as St. Elisabeth and St. Barbara Hospital is currently facing several challenges. Primarily the hospital, like all other healthcare providers, is under intense pressure to cut costs and to become more competitive. This means that savings have to be made where suitable, however, without adversely affecting the running of the hospital. After careful review, virtually consolidating the IT landscape presented itself as an opportunity to achieve the desired reduction in expenditure and also to improve system performance and implement a robust, centralised backup and archiving strategy.

"As an academic teaching hospital we are under enormous pressure to test and introduce innovations at an early stage, both medical and technical, to be able to provide our patients and students with the best possible conditions", said Dr. med. Walter Asperger, Medical Director of the hospital. "The subject of virtualisation in particular is an important aspect. By implementing such consolidation projects, hospitals have the potential to achieve significant savings as regards hardware and support costs while setting up a more effective IT infrastructure at comparatively low investment costs. The increase in efficiency has a positive effect on improving the quality of performance and also on optimising costs", added Dr. jur. Manfred Brümmer, Managing Director oft he hospital.

A further challenge was the privatisation of the hospital's own radiology department. After the sale and reorganisation as a radiological practice, the hospital's outpatient and inpatient patients now receive treatment here. To keep both areas separate for billing transparency, the hospital decided to keep clients separate in the Sectra PACS application. This transparent solution concept, which was also integrated into the system by iSOFT, ensures that the practice can be run in parallel for the hospital as well as other referring GPs, thus guaranteeing data is kept completely separate. With this technology, inpatient and outpatient treatment processes can be conducted more smoothly.
 
The contract is scheduled to run for five years. The hospital's investment amounts to over €250,000 in hardware, software licences and maintenance and support services for the new systems. In this way, St. Elisabeth and St. Barbara Hospital Halle is setting up a redundant, visualised IT environment with a centralised backup and archiving architecture. This will help to reduce the operative IT costs in the long term and to improve the efficiency of the resources used.

St. Elisabeth and St. Barbara Hospital, Halle

St. Elisabeth and St. Barbara Hospital is an academic teaching hospital of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. It focuses on specialised care and offers 595 inpatient beds. It has over 11 clinics specialising in surgery, internal medicine (LHM), psychotherapy and psychosomatics, gynaecology and obstetrics, paediatrics and youth medicine, paediatric surgery, child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy, anaesthesiology (both adult and children) with intensive care, radiology (MRI, CT, DSA) as well as a social paediatrics centre.