SNW: Community Hospitals looks to save $11M with data digitization

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- Rick Copple, chief technology officer at Community Hospitals of Indiana Inc., is in the middle of transforming the company's four-hospital chain from a paper-based system to an all-digital data environment. He is also shoring up disaster recovery plans with a fiber-optic network that will allow him to mirror data in real time to a central data center. Copple estimates that the project will save his company $11 million over the next 13 years through increased efficiencies.
The health care provider began its transformation when it opened its all-digital Indiana Heart Hospital two and a half years ago. Now it wants to move its other three hospitals to digital environments and connect all four hospitals to a main data center in downtown Indianapolis -- an effort that will require consolidating 150 T1 lines onto a fiber ring this year.
"That's really important to us from a disaster recovery point," Copple said in an interview with Computerworld here at last week's Storage Networking World conference.
The health care system, with 8,500 employees, is currently expanding the physical infrastructure of its north Indianapolis hospital and plans to have it all digital by 2007. The change will include bedside documentation systems, a picture archiving and communications system, and a physician documentation system.
"We needed as near real time as possible. They wanted 30 minutes or less on a switch-over [in case of an emergency], and the only way to do that is real-time synchronization," Copple said.
Copple is using SANsymphony virtualization software with asynchronous online mirroring from DataCore Software Corp. in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to replicate data to the downtown disaster recovery site.
Community Hospitals' other two facilities -- its East and South Indianapolis campuses -- are at different stages of project completion. But Copple has been running into resistance throughout the process. "The toughest one to crack ... is getting physicians to do their documentation online. They do not like change," he said.
Other than employee pushback, Copple said, one of the biggest challenges he has faced in rolling out the electronic systems has been with data storage. His midtier storage systems from IBM were continually plagued with disk failures and other events, and his FAStT-700 disk arrays had "major reliability issues."
"It was always something with them," Copple said. "We had some serious troubles with FAStTs not staying up. We'd be the first in the country to hit one of their bugs in their hardware. It was to the point where it brought us down several times for lengthy periods