One of Oregon’s largest healthcare facilities finds EMR stability and major cost-savings with new colocation arrangement.
PRLog - May 15, 2013 - BEAVERTON, Ore. -- A medical-records system crash at a major hospital can be a critical IT emergency, and Salem Health had experienced several such outages before moving its EMR system to EasyStreet Online Services in Beaverton, Oregon.
“In the 15 months that we’ve been with EasyStreet, we haven’t had a single service interruption,” says David Olszewski, data architect for Salem Health, who oversaw the selection of EasyStreet to provide colocation services to one of Oregon’s largest healthcare operations. “It’s been an excellent move.”
“EMR (electronic medical records) is the heart and soul of the hospital,” he explained. “When there’s an EMR outage of any sort, it affects all aspects of patient care – from admitting, to direct patient care and diagnostics, all the way through to patient billing. So when the EMR system is down, we feel every second of it.”
In fact, recurring system outages were a key reason Salem Health decided in 2011 to move away from its previous hosting facility in Virginia – about 2,800 miles from the Oregon state capital where Salem Health is located – that provided colocation as well as some other managed services.
Cost was another big reason for the move. “We’ve realized a $900,000-a-year savings, comparing EasyStreet with our previous hosting company,” Olszewski noted. “Some of the savings is due to the fact that we’ve insourced all of the actual hardware support. We now own our hardware, whereas in our previous situation we were shared or leased owners of the hardware.”
“We’ve realized other savings through our back-up process,” he continued. “The previous company charged us an arm and a leg to back up every bit of data. While that might not seem significant, the fact is we run four different copies of the same environment – so if the EMR is growing by 300-gig a year, you times that by four, and it quickly becomes a very significant cost.”
Deciding on Colocation
Salem Health includes Salem Hospital – a 454-bed acute-care facility with Oregon’s busiest emergency department, and 4,000 employees – as well as the Regional Rehabilitation Center in Salem, West Valley Hospital in nearby Dallas, plus a group of health clinics spread throughout a five-county area. For several years, Salem Health has relied on Epic Systems Inc. for its patient management and accounting systems.
Salem Health’s IT management decided in 2011 to terminate the relationship with the Virginia hosting company and bring those activities “closer to home,” Olszewski recalled. The situation was intensified by the repeated EMR outages, which he refers to as “a very, very bad experience.”
“We had a combination of opportunities,” he continued. “One was to put it in our local data center. Another was to have it hosted by somebody externally, similar to the setup we had before. The other option – the one we decided on – was to colocate the EMR so we could have it in a data center with all of the services EasyStreet provides and then manage the system ourselves.”
He said colocating the EMR system held some important advantages for Salem Health. “We really wanted to have the system offsite for disaster recovery, and there were also questions about whether we had adequate power and cooling in our existing data center.”
Olszewski’s team conducted a formal RFP process to narrow the candidates to three, selecting EasyStreet in October of 2011.
“We settled on EasyStreet for a combination of factors,” he explained. “Price was not the main one, although EasyStreet was definitely less expensive than the other two. The primary factor was we thought we’d get more attentive support from a smaller colocation provider – and we certainly have.”
Exceeding Expectations
Salem Health has colocation space in EasyStreet’s Data Center 2, a state-of-the-art facility recognized by the State of Oregon for outstanding energy efficiency. It uses an Indirect Evaporative Cooling (IEC) system, controllable chimney cabinets for sophisticated hot-air isolation, a flywheel-based UPS for increased power reliability, and several other innovative technologies earning Type II SSAE 16 classification for both of EasyStreet’s Beaverton data centers.
“EasyStreet has been very accommodating,” Olszewski said. “We asked for a cage so we could even have a desk inside it and room for expansion. Throughout the process – including getting our alternate network path set up – EasyStreet worked with us to have everything in place for our go-live. They’ve been pretty exceptional, and we’ve been happy with the service we’ve received.”
“Part of our design was to be a lights-out data center, and so EasyStreet worked with us to make sure we had redundant Internet and the ability to manage our PDUs, (power distribution units) so we can turn on or off any system remotely, just right to the power plug,” he explained. “So together we designed it pretty carefully to be lights out.”
Asked whether EasyStreet has achieved Salem Health’s IT expectations for hosting, Olszewski said: “They’ve met our expectations and then some.” One example he cited was when EasyStreet successfully trained the healthcare facility’s IT staff on use of the Orion network-monitoring product from SolarWinds®, which Salem Health decided to use for its own data center after observing its use at EasyStreet.
“It truly has been a partnership,” he said. “We’ve never felt the vendor-customer relationship in the uncomfortable way you experience it in some situations. Instead, we’ve used additional EasyStreet services we didn’t think we’d ask for, but have been pleased with. Every time we call EasyStreet we get fantastic customer support and the very personalized service we’d hoped we’d get.”
About EasyStreet Online Services
Serving the region since 1995, EasyStreet® Online Services is Oregon’s most trusted locally-headquartered enterprise-class IT Services provider. Known for its consultative approach, EasyStreet helps its customers integrate Cloud, colocation and managed services to create the flexible — and reliable — computing infrastructure that meets their needs. EasyStreet offers specialized Professional Services including Cloud migration, Cloud readiness assessment, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning, network, monitoring and architecture design, capacity planning and implementation support. With a long-standing commitment to sustainable practices, EasyStreet buys offsets for 100% of the electricity, water and natural gas its Beaverton facilities consume — resulting in zero carbon footprint operations. EasyStreet’s Beaverton data centers are third-party SSAE 16 Type II audited and Private Cloud environments have been verified for HIPAA/HITECH compliance. Additional information can be found at http://easystreet.com.
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“In the 15 months that we’ve been with EasyStreet, we haven’t had a single service interruption,” says David Olszewski, data architect for Salem Health, who oversaw the selection of EasyStreet to provide colocation services to one of Oregon’s largest healthcare operations. “It’s been an excellent move.”
“EMR (electronic medical records) is the heart and soul of the hospital,” he explained. “When there’s an EMR outage of any sort, it affects all aspects of patient care – from admitting, to direct patient care and diagnostics, all the way through to patient billing. So when the EMR system is down, we feel every second of it.”
In fact, recurring system outages were a key reason Salem Health decided in 2011 to move away from its previous hosting facility in Virginia – about 2,800 miles from the Oregon state capital where Salem Health is located – that provided colocation as well as some other managed services.
Cost was another big reason for the move. “We’ve realized a $900,000-a-year savings, comparing EasyStreet with our previous hosting company,” Olszewski noted. “Some of the savings is due to the fact that we’ve insourced all of the actual hardware support. We now own our hardware, whereas in our previous situation we were shared or leased owners of the hardware.”
“We’ve realized other savings through our back-up process,” he continued. “The previous company charged us an arm and a leg to back up every bit of data. While that might not seem significant, the fact is we run four different copies of the same environment – so if the EMR is growing by 300-gig a year, you times that by four, and it quickly becomes a very significant cost.”
Deciding on Colocation
Salem Health includes Salem Hospital – a 454-bed acute-care facility with Oregon’s busiest emergency department, and 4,000 employees – as well as the Regional Rehabilitation Center in Salem, West Valley Hospital in nearby Dallas, plus a group of health clinics spread throughout a five-county area. For several years, Salem Health has relied on Epic Systems Inc. for its patient management and accounting systems.
Salem Health’s IT management decided in 2011 to terminate the relationship with the Virginia hosting company and bring those activities “closer to home,” Olszewski recalled. The situation was intensified by the repeated EMR outages, which he refers to as “a very, very bad experience.”
“We had a combination of opportunities,” he continued. “One was to put it in our local data center. Another was to have it hosted by somebody externally, similar to the setup we had before. The other option – the one we decided on – was to colocate the EMR so we could have it in a data center with all of the services EasyStreet provides and then manage the system ourselves.”
He said colocating the EMR system held some important advantages for Salem Health. “We really wanted to have the system offsite for disaster recovery, and there were also questions about whether we had adequate power and cooling in our existing data center.”
Olszewski’s team conducted a formal RFP process to narrow the candidates to three, selecting EasyStreet in October of 2011.
“We settled on EasyStreet for a combination of factors,” he explained. “Price was not the main one, although EasyStreet was definitely less expensive than the other two. The primary factor was we thought we’d get more attentive support from a smaller colocation provider – and we certainly have.”
Exceeding Expectations
Salem Health has colocation space in EasyStreet’s Data Center 2, a state-of-the-art facility recognized by the State of Oregon for outstanding energy efficiency. It uses an Indirect Evaporative Cooling (IEC) system, controllable chimney cabinets for sophisticated hot-air isolation, a flywheel-based UPS for increased power reliability, and several other innovative technologies earning Type II SSAE 16 classification for both of EasyStreet’s Beaverton data centers.
“EasyStreet has been very accommodating,” Olszewski said. “We asked for a cage so we could even have a desk inside it and room for expansion. Throughout the process – including getting our alternate network path set up – EasyStreet worked with us to have everything in place for our go-live. They’ve been pretty exceptional, and we’ve been happy with the service we’ve received.”
“Part of our design was to be a lights-out data center, and so EasyStreet worked with us to make sure we had redundant Internet and the ability to manage our PDUs, (power distribution units) so we can turn on or off any system remotely, just right to the power plug,” he explained. “So together we designed it pretty carefully to be lights out.”
Asked whether EasyStreet has achieved Salem Health’s IT expectations for hosting, Olszewski said: “They’ve met our expectations and then some.” One example he cited was when EasyStreet successfully trained the healthcare facility’s IT staff on use of the Orion network-monitoring product from SolarWinds®, which Salem Health decided to use for its own data center after observing its use at EasyStreet.
“It truly has been a partnership,” he said. “We’ve never felt the vendor-customer relationship in the uncomfortable way you experience it in some situations. Instead, we’ve used additional EasyStreet services we didn’t think we’d ask for, but have been pleased with. Every time we call EasyStreet we get fantastic customer support and the very personalized service we’d hoped we’d get.”
About EasyStreet Online Services
Serving the region since 1995, EasyStreet® Online Services is Oregon’s most trusted locally-headquartered enterprise-class IT Services provider. Known for its consultative approach, EasyStreet helps its customers integrate Cloud, colocation and managed services to create the flexible — and reliable — computing infrastructure that meets their needs. EasyStreet offers specialized Professional Services including Cloud migration, Cloud readiness assessment, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning, network, monitoring and architecture design, capacity planning and implementation support. With a long-standing commitment to sustainable practices, EasyStreet buys offsets for 100% of the electricity, water and natural gas its Beaverton facilities consume — resulting in zero carbon footprint operations. EasyStreet’s Beaverton data centers are third-party SSAE 16 Type II audited and Private Cloud environments have been verified for HIPAA/HITECH compliance. Additional information can be found at http://easystreet.com.
Read Full Story - Salem Health IT’s Vital Signs are Good Since Moving to EasyStreet | More news from this source
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