ACADEMIA

Receives HP/Intel Mission-Critical Innovation Award for online storage and disaster recovery in imaging

In a world-wide competition, University Hospitals (UH) received the Mission-Critical Innovation Award - Humanitarian/Environmental Impact category presented by the multinational information technology companies Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Intel. The award recognizes UH's leadership in information technology for groundbreaking work in developing solutions for mission-critical computing.

The award was presented Nov. 28 in Vienna, Austria. Accepting it for UH were Jeffrey Sunshine, M.D., Ph.D., Vice Chairman, Department of Radiology, and Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer; Himanshu Pandya, Vice President, Radiology Services, and Karen Erhard, UH Radiology PACS manager.

The Humanitarian/Environmental Impact Award looks at organizations using advanced Itanium-based systems to make a positive impact on society or the environment. (Itanium refers to Intel microprocessors used in enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems.)

UH won this category for its disaster-tolerant PACS (picture archiving and communication system) solution for processing and archiving of digital radiology images. The UH Department of Radiology, which provides more than 700,000 radiology exams annually across 25 locations in the UH system, led an integrated information technology team in designing, configuring and installing HP Itanium servers and other equipment for archiving and online storage. The plans included a disaster recovery site of redundant systems to eliminate downtime which would affect patient care. The recovery site provides, for example, continuous millisecond transfer of all information to a second complete copy of the PACS system in a separate facility. The new system allows for improved workflow, shared patient information and images with a common PACS for all locations, reduced turnaround time, support for future growth within the health system, improved radiologist access to diagnostic studies, improved patient's continuum of care and business continuity with data replication.

"This recognition represents strong global affirmation of University Hospitals' commitment to provide extraordinary technology in providing excellent patient care at all times, under normal operations or even during disaster conditions," said Dr. Sunshine.

UH went up against two other finalists in the category: Enagas, Spain's gas management company, for its Green Datacenter project, and Purvis Systems for migrating the Fire Department of New York City's computer assisted emergency dispatch to a newer Itanium-based server infrastructure and OpenVMS.