Hopkinton, Massachusetts, 03 Dec 2008
EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that the Cancer Treatment Centres of America (CTCA), a national network of cancer treatment hospitals and community oncology programmes, has successfully implemented an EMC information infrastructure to support its comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) initiative. EHRs, digital files containing patient medical data, enable physicians to increase efficiency and better serve their patients.
By implementing EMC technology to support this initiative, CTCA has achieved more responsive patient care, faster and uninterrupted access to medical data and increased operational efficiency. In addition, massive storage and server consolidation, and automation of data recovery, backup and restore functions have enabled CTCA to manage its growing information infrastructure more cost-efficiently and without adding storage administrative staff.
Chad Eckes, Chief Information Officer, CTCA, said: “We've fully embraced the EHR because of its potential to help improve patient care and safety more than any other IT initiative. Unlike the traditional approach of incrementally adding new applications and IT components to achieve an EHR, CTCA engineered a complete transformation of our IT application architecture all at once. We now have a cohesive, centralised system that integrates every aspect of a patient's care and delivers unprecedented information security and availability.
“The EHR is already running in our three existing cancer hospitals, and we'll extend the benefits even further when we open our first all-digital hospital in Phoenix in December 2008. The CTCA system will help CTCA enhance each patient's treatment experience from the point of admission forward. Everything from viewing medical history in the operating room to submitting insurance claims to filling prescriptions will be done electronically.”
To launch the EHR project, CTCA replaced storage directly attached to its servers with a centralised EMC CLARiiON storage area network (SAN). CTCA also deployed several new applications, such as Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, as well as integrated existing applications, such as Lawson enterprise resource planning software and Microsoft Exchange e-mail, into the new infrastructure.
“Each year, we are adding vast quantities of new medical data and clinical applications online, EMC's SAN has enabled us to scale smoothly to storage capacities that have grown by 600% to 60TB in less than two years,” said Eckes. “Even though the environment is significantly bigger and more diverse, we've been able to maintain our storage needs with a team of two employees who manage all of the SAN, replication and backup support on a part-time basis. With the SAN's ease of use and simplified management, we're able to do a lot more with the same amount of resources.”
In the latest phase of its EHR deployment, Schaumberg, Illinois-based CTCA implemented EMC RecoverPoint to replicate all of its clinical and administrative information stored on the EMC CLARiiON to another CLARiiON located at a remote data centre 40 miles away.
Rakesh Patel, Director of Infrastructure and Security, CTCA, said: “We use EMC to replicate new data every second so our clinicians always have a current view of a patient's status. If our data centre failed, we would recover from clean data as opposed to data that is hours old. We also can bring up our production systems at our remote site in less than two hours compared with the three to four days a recovery used to take us.”
In addition, VMware virtualisation solutions have contributed to improving CTCA's information availability. With VMware, CTCA was able to consolidate 70% of its physical servers as virtual machines, reducing the number of physical servers. CTCA utilises RecoverPoint to replicate the virtual machines stored on the EMC CLARiiON and to integrate with VMware Site Recovery Manager to automate the recovery process in case of a site failure. If a virtual machine needs more resources than is being provided, CTCA uses VMware's VMotion to move the virtual machine from one physical server to another - online, and without service interruption. In addition, if a physical server fails, VMware High Availability automatically fails over the virtual machines to operational servers.
Patel said: “That consolidation alone contributes to a more reliable environment because there is less complexity. And, using VMware and EMC recovery tools together ensures that our physical and virtualised environments can be centrally managed and well protected.”
CTCA also uses EMC NetWorker software to back up its entire production environment to an EMC Disk Library 4100, which is replicated to another Disk Library. The disk backups are eventually ported to tape for longer-term storage.
Patel said: “It used to take 12 hours to back up 1.8TB to tape. With NetWorker and Disk Library, we back up more than twice that much data in less than four hours. In a 24-hour operation like a hospital, it's crucial to get the data backed up quickly so it's not slowing down the applications.”
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