KishHealth System Chooses HP Converged Storage to Speed Delivery of Medical Records

HP - Press Releases - January 23, 2013 

KishHealth System Chooses HP Converged Storage to Speed Delivery of Medical Records

PALO ALTO, Calif. – HP today announced that KishHealth System , a community health provider, has selected HP Converged Storage to improve patient care by accelerating medical record delivery.

DeKalb, Ill.-based KishHealth System provides outpatient services in 13 facilities across Northern Illinois. To speed medical record delivery and eliminate hand-written errors, KishHealth wanted to transition from hard copy to digital records. This required a scalable platform that could support the capacity demands for storing medical images on its Agfa Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). KishHealth also sought to increase data center performance to improve response time of its MEDITECH electronic medical records (EMR) system.

Upgrading its infrastructure with HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreOnce Backup and HP StoreAll Storage has enabled KishHealth to increase performance, capacity utilization and availability for medical records and imaging applications while simplifying IT administration.

“To ensure the highest-quality patient care, KishHealth needed a storage platform capable of maintaining maximum performance while scaling to accommodate our expanding digital medical records and communication requirements,” said Patrick Yonke, senior systems administrator, KishHealth System. “HP Converged Storage meets KishHealth’s long-term capacity needs while improving workflow quality and efficiency to ensure our patients don’t have to wait for quality care.”

HP Converged Storage, a key component of HP Converged Infrastructure , integrates scale-out federated software with standardized hardware platforms that leverage proven HP technology, enabling KishHealth to:

• Accelerate patient medical record routing to more than 250 physicians and 1,300 employees via HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, which improved KishHealth’s MEDITECH EMR system response time 60 percent.
• Increase workflow productivity with HP StoreOnce Backup deduplicationcombined with HP partner BridgeHead’s Integrated Serverless Backup, which improved system performance and application availability by reducing EMR data backup time from six hours to just minutes.
• Lower data center total cost of ownership with HP StoreOnce Backup and HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software . HP StoreOnce Backup reduced KishHealth’s PACS data storage consumption by 92 percent with deduplication capabilities that consolidate data and increase disk storage efficiency on the backup system. Thin provisioning maximizes capacity utilization, eliminating the healthcare provider’s need to purchase additional hardware as EMR repository requirements increase. Thin provisioning reduced overall storage capacity by 62 percent through the creation of a centralized pool of available storage.
• Improve data center efficiency using the HP 3PAR Management Console , which enables KishHealth to administer and optimize storage systems via a single window, including remote replication to disaster recovery sites, nondisruptive online system upgrades and system performance monitoring.
• Increase medical staff productivity though centralized management of HP StoreAll Storage, which speeds image retrieval times by increasing storage capacity and flexibility while reducing costs for KishHealth’s Agfa PACS medical imaging data.

KishHealth also transferred its VMware View Client Virtualization software to the HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage system to better manage its client environment.This provides improved desktop computer performance and enhanced data center control along with security of both the EMR and PACs data with significantly reduced wait times for employees, doctors and patients.

“Healthcare institutions seeking to improve patient care can’t risk application performance decline and workflow disruptions with legacy data centers incapable of meeting digital medical record system capacity requirements,” said Chris Riley, vice president, U.S., Storage, HP. “In addition to scalability to accommodate future digital record growth, HP Converged Storage delivers around-the-clock availability and increased application performance, enabling KishHealth to improve the quality as well as responsiveness of patient care.” 

(Source: www.hp.com)