EMC Equals E-Commerce for Virtual Healthware Services; Company Improves Quality of Patient Care With EMC Enterprise Storage
Business/Technology Editors
HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 16, 1999--EMC Corporation, world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems, software and services, announced today that Virtual Healthware Services (VHS), a leading supplier of Internet-based patient records services for healthcare facilities, has implemented EMC Enterprise Storage to enhance quality of patient care through improved data availability and streamlined information management. "The Electronic Patient Record (EPR) is the most mission-critical of all our applications. Since we can't always anticipate when people will need treatment, healthcare systems must be online all the time," said Joe Brown, VHS's Director of Information Technology. "EMC Enterprise Storage enables our Web-based services to provide clinicians with a single, instantaneous view of patient data -- regardless of where it may reside across the healthcare network. Using our service, a physician can walk up to a workstation in the Emergency Room and pull up a patient chart right away - rather than waiting up to an hour for Medical Records to deliver the same information in paper format. "EMC plays a vital role in this information network by speeding access to important patient information," Brown observed. "This translates into better patient care around the clock."
VHS, based in Cincinnati, is using EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and EMC TimeFinder software in the process of backing up an Oracle database and other application data residing on Windows NT and DIGITAL UNIX servers. "EMC TimeFinder works in the background while our systems are online so our customers can continue to access medical records," Brown explained. "Being able to efficiently handle backups for our customers eliminates a major cost for them and makes our services more attractive. In addition, TimeFinder significantly reduces the overhead of backing up multiple Windows NT servers."
Brown pointed to the cost of ownership advantages of EMC Enterprise Storage. "We also looked at optical storage solutions, but found them to be less flexible, expensive to maintain, and not as reliable. EMC Enterprise Storage, on the other hand, allows us to drive more value from our storage investment since we can use the same systems for both our Windows NT and UNIX information. Moreover, as our growing business generates more information every day, EMC plays a key role in making sure we can accommodate growth and satisfy any unexpected capacity requirements without any disruption to our users." "As the healthcare industry grows in size and complexity, internet-based information is becoming more essential to the delivery of high-quality patient care," said Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels. "EMC Enterprise Storage provides healthcare firms with a strong, flexible, Web-enabled infrastructure that ensures rapid response times, continuous access to information, and scalability to easily handle growth and change."
Traditional data mirroring involves an original disk and its reflected image on a second disk. EMC TimeFinder expands traditional mirroring techniques by non-disruptively creating multiple, independently addressable copies for backups, data warehouse loading, decision support applications, application development, Year 2000 testing and other activities that require copies of data. By issuing commands from the host system, these Business Continuity Volumes (BCVs) can be managed separately and used to run simultaneous tasks in parallel with one another. Once the task is complete, the volume can be resynchronized with the production volume, reassigned to another production volume or maintained in place for another task.
Virtual Healthware Services delivers document imaging, workflow, outsourced operations and related capabilities from remote data centers and on-site scan centers, via low-cost, secure intranet technology to improve health information access across the enterprise. Virtual Healthware Services is the healthcare data center division of LanVision Systems, Inc., a leading provider of healthcare information access systems that enable hospitals and integrated healthcare networks to capture, manage, retrieve, process and store vast amounts of clinical and financial patient information. |
