Aussie company keeps U.S. healthcare group in the pink
Aussie company keeps U.S. healthcare group in the pink
Australian software company Integrated Research is in rude health after securing a deal to supply U.S.-based not-for-profit healthcare group PeaceHealth with real-time systems management software to keep its business critical information systems in check.
PeaceHealth has implemented Prognosis, which is a family of real-time systems management products, developed in Sydney by Integrated Research. The software manages some of the world’s highest availability business environments based on the HP NonStop platform, and works across mixed-platform Windows, Unix and Linux environments. It was initially installed to manage the availability and performance of PeaceHealth's Lastword health administration software, which automates the group's administrative workflow and enables rapid access to patient and clinical information.
"Lastword integrates our core clinical processes for orders, results, pharmacy and care documentation, in concert with administrative and financial processes for scheduling, registration, admitting, charging and billing," said PeaceHealth System Administrator Gail Harris.
"It is pivotal in getting the right information from patients to doctors, pharmacies and third-party laboratories, and allows us to deliver accurate, patient-centric service throughout our clinic network. Any disruption to our core systems directly affects access to the Lastword application which, in turn, can have a serious impact on patient service irrespective of how many failsafe measures we have in place."
Harris said that Prognosis is used to compensate for the poor file capacity planning functions of PeaceHealth’s incumbent management software.
"Getting a view on how quickly certain system files were used was very labour intensive and not very accurate. Prognosis gave us a real-time view of our capacity metrics, so we could easily track file usage and prevent any outages from capacity bottlenecks. In many cases, Prognosis accurately predicted, to within minutes, when a file would be full."
From an application management perspective, transaction monitoring proved problematic before PeaceHealth purchased the transaction module in Prognosis. In severe cases the incumbent software caused major application downtime that required up to two hours of manual work to rectify, which Prognosis has now rectified.
"Two hours of downtime has a major impact on our services,” said Harris. "With Prognosis we can track and resolve a problematic transaction in less than five minutes, which minimises any effect on system performance."
David Walsh, PeaceHealth System Administrator, said the software has helped the 11-strong PeaceHealth systems management team to shift from a reactive to proactive monitoring and workflow.
"With a real-time view on the critical system metrics across the organisation, we don't have to manually look for problems anymore; Prognosis finds 'out of specification' conditions for us, and often pre-empts potential outages by alerting us when critical thresholds are breached."
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