HEALTH

South Eastern Sydney Area Health Service (SESAHS), the largest area health service provider in New South Wales (NSW), is upgrading its patient care and hospital administration systems to run iSOFT's i.Patient Manager software on Intel Itanium 2 processor- and Intel Xeon processor-based IBM servers. The implementation is expected to deliver enhanced patient care and improved information sharing among the area's 10 hospitals and its 6,100 clinical staff. It will also provide SESAHS with highly scaleable architecture required to comply with the NSW state government's planned electronic health record (EHR) system. SESAHS will replace its existing Alpha* based servers with a three-tiered architecture of three IBM x455 eight-way Itanium 2-based database servers; 10 IBM HS20 (blade server) two-way Intel Xeon processor-based Citrix* servers; and six IBM x345 two-way Intel Xeon processor application and development servers. The new platform lays the foundation for SESAHS as it moves toward an integrated patient care and clinical system, allowing more users to access the system and more streamlined health care delivery. iSoft's i.Patient Manager will replace SESAHS's outdated 20-year-old patient administration system that was becoming increasingly expensive to support. Other applications likely to be migrated include various corporate, human resources and financial data warehouse functions. SESAHS intends to use the Itanium 2 architecture implementation to improve efficiency and effectiveness of patient care services through better access to information and streamlining of work practices. In the long term, it will facilitate the implementation of a clinical point-of-care and an electronic health record through the use of standard integration protocols. The project is being rolled out in phases with a number of hospitals going live this year and in 2005. Medical practitioners and patients benefit from the implementation through operational and cost efficiencies, reduced waiting times for patients and better planning and coordination of patient care. "System performance and reliability plays an important role in health care delivery," said George Cascales, director of information management and technology services at SESAHS. "The Itanium 2-based servers provide us with a robust and scaleable platform for sharing information across the entire area health service. When we reviewed our future capacity requirements it became clear we needed additional scalability to cope with government requirements and the anticipated growth in demand for health services in the coming years." "The Itanium 2 architecture takes scalability to new levels by removing barriers to server expandability, particularly at the database layer," said Corey Loehr, health industry manager, Intel Australia. "This implementation shows how organizations with even the largest databases can enjoy the total cost of ownership benefits of Intel architecture." "The SESAHS deployment represents a further extension in our ability to deliver systems regardless of environment size and complexity," said Byron Phillips, chief information officer, at iSOFT Asia Pacific. "This is currently the largest single implementation of i.Patient Manager in the world following a number of increasingly large implementations which we expect to continue in line with government agendas. The combination of iSOFT and Intel architecture provides hospitals with lower cost of ownership, high performance and reliability."