31 July 2010
Saturday
Virtualization helps Palomar Pomerado Health move to the forefront of digital healthcare
By Allan Tan | Aug 5, 2009
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Palomar Pomerado Health (PPH), the largest public health district in California, has gone live with a new virtualized information infrastructure which is enabling PPH to manage and store electronic medical records for the very first time, dramatically improving the availability of critical information and create a more manageable storage infrastructure.
PPH serves more than 500,000 patients in North San Diego County and is recognized for its cardiac care, women’s services, cancer, orthopedics, trauma, rehabilitation and behavioral health services. PPH has major expansion plans including another hospital and moving toward fully automated medical records to better serve its patients.
With the goal to add a new, customized computerized physician order entry (CPOE) program next year, the hospital needed to upgrade its current IT infrastructure to set the stage for a secure, reliable information infrastructure.
To create the new information infrastructure, PPH consolidated mission critical applications over to two IBM System p5 590servers to run its clinical software, support additional users to dramatically improve server availability. The hospital also implemented a virtualized storage environment based on the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
To maintain the flexibility to assign the most cost effective storage systems based on user requirements, the hospital implemented a tiered storage system. The IBM DS6800 and DS4300 storage arrays augmented an existing IBM Enterprise Storage System and were configured in the SAN. Each storage system was assigned to a tier, based on performance and cost helping to eliminate the need to over-provision storage. SVC also helps improve storage availability by enabling storage system maintenance to take place without disrupting users.
“IBM’s storage virtualization solution coupled with our IBM UNIX server solution gives us flexibility in managing our growth. We need to save certain health records for decades and storage virtualization will play a role in helping us accomplish much needed archive capabilities at a significantly reduced cost,” said Paul Engberg, Director of Technical Services, Palomar Pomerado Health.
In the future, PPH plans to add a second SAN to mirror data for disaster recovery to help restore operations in a matter of hours which would enable PPH staff to continue to provide quality healthcare with very little disruption in unforeseen disasters.
