October 2016

Case Study :

A Provincial Hospital in China -- Part 2 of 2

Review :

The Customer. Our case subject is a provincial hospital located in the East China Region. Originally founded by American missionaries in the late 1900th, the century-old tradition and evolution has turned it into a nationally recognized first-rate regional healthcare facility. To protect its privacy, our customer has requested that we write this story under a disguised name. We honor that request and will simply refer to it as CSPH, short for Case Study Provincial Hospital.

Background: Hospital Information System. A hospital information system (HIS) is a comprehensive information system dealing with all aspects of information processing in a hospital. It is an integrated, computer-assisted system designed to collect, store, manipulate, retrieve and communicate information concerned with the administrative and clinical aspects of services within the hospital. An effective HIS system can elevate the efficiency of all tasks -- from administrative to clinical to managerial. Ultimately, it raises quality of work and assures economic benefits for both patients and the hospital.

Challenge: Provide High-Availability HIS System. The HIS is basically the core transactional system of the hospital. It is often the main data entry point, the main database, the main source of census and reports of almost all hospital transactions. The most commonly-available modules in an HIS - such as patient registration, admission, discharge, transfer, billing, insurance claims submission, pharmacy management, supply and inventory, accountings, human resources - give a hint of the wide coverage of transactions handled by the system. These and other transactions are mission-critical to the hospital, they generate and utilize large volume of data around the clock on daily basis, they rely on a dependable HIS that is available 7*24.

The system’s high availability (HA) must be addressed at all levels, including application, host, network, and storage. A sound HA system should deploy software-clustered hosts and virtual host technology, to ensure the availability of hosts and continuity of applications; as well as fully redundant SAN switches to ensure the availability of network paths. In addition, the storage must be enabled to deliver equivalent availability, so that an end-to-end redundancy from hosts through network to storage may be achieved.

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