ROGER WILLIAMS MEDICAL CENTER BOOSTS ITS IT INFRASTRUCTURE:-
Roger Williams Medical Center is a 220-bed hospital located in Providence, Rhode Island. It has been widely recognized as a leading provider of health care, not only on the East coast but throughout the United States. Roger Williams faced a difficult challenge implementing several key new IT systems because of its aging IT infrastructure. According to Kevin Frederick, Director of Technology, at Roger Williams, "Our legacy systems had reached the end of their life cycle, and we knew that we would need a big jump in processing power and storage capacity to support our new applications." Those new applications included MEDITECH, a new comprehensive patient-care system, and the Picture Archive Communication System (PACS).
PACS stores and distributes electronic images from CAT scans, MRI, ultrasound and other image-based tests (totaling more than 19,000 annually), allowing health care providers to diagnose conditions and diseases using high-resolution monitors. To achieve the scalability, availability, and performance required, Roger Williams contracted HP Services to design, develop, deliver, and support its needed IT infrastructure. That infrastructure includes a server farm of 41 servers connected to a storage area network with 4 terabytes of capacity to start.
Kevin made the following statements regarding working with HP Services and its IT infrastructure: "The BladeServer systems [server farm] enabled us to reduce the footprint of our racked servers by 50 percent, while giving us plenty of headroom for growth . . . The blades have a smart design-with power integrated into the chassis, they are easy to deploy and fast to swap. If a problem were to develop, we can easily deploy one of our ‘cold spares' and minimize any disruption of service. HP Services spent the week assembling the SANS and educated us along the way. I couldn't have asked for it to go any better."
Even users of the new system frequently comment on how much faster the new system performs. The IT infrastructure certainly supports scalability and increased processing capacity. After the new system had been online for nine months, Roger Williams added 11 more servers as it expanded the user-facing applications within MEDITECH and PACS.
Many of those user-facing applications are critical to Roger Williams' success. These include numerous clinical modules, Patient Tracker (for emergency room services), and Long Term Care (for nursing home support). The future of Roger Williams and its IT infrastructure is to develop an intensive business continuity plan that will provide for redundant data servers. 13,14
Questions
1. In this chapter, we noted that many effectiveness metrics depend on the application under scrutiny, such as supply chain management and customer relationship management. What sort of effectiveness metrics would the health care industry likely use to evaluate the success of IT systems? Where possible, highlight the use of these effectiveness metrics by Roger Williams.
2. In the final part of this case study, Roger Williams was making plans to create a business continuity plan for its information. Why do you think the hospital had not already developed such a plan in the event of a disaster? How is HP's new IT infrastructure going to help Roger Williams build a robust business continuity plan?
3. According to the network infrastructures we discussed in this chapter, how would you characterize Roger Williams' new IT infrastructure? Justify your answer.
4. As a part of a business continuity plan, many businesses identify cold sites or hot sites to which they can move to carry on their business activities. What about a hospital like Roger Williams? What if it suffered a disaster such as a flood or hurricane? Where could it move to provide quality patient care?
5. What infrastructure-centric metrics can you fi nd in this case study? Why are they so important to Roger Williams? What other infrastructurecentric metrics might be important to the hospital?