St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center implements IBM storage solution to help transform patient care

"Our patients are our number one priority, but the technology infrastructure we had in place could not support the growing technology needs of the hospital to deliver to our staff digitized x-rays and critical patient data instantaneously", stated Chris Ryan, Manager of Information Technology, St. Joseph's. "Our new IBM solution we have in place now far exceeds what we previously owned. We now have the ability to add capacity on demand and our staff can access patient records and digital x-rays nearly instantaneously, helping to vastly improve patient care."

St. Joseph's worked with IBM Global Services to replace its EMC storage hardware with an IBM TotalStorage infrastructure including the DS4100, DS4300, and ESS 800 systems. An IBM eServer p630 system was also installed to help run IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM's back-up and recovery software. The hospital's new system is designed to store up to 15 terabytes of information and speed the retrieval of patient records for doctors and medical staff from minutes to seconds.

St. Joseph's technology environment of IBM hardware now has five times as much capacity as its previous EMC platform. Additionally, the significant decrease in maintenance has reduced storage and technology costs by half and overall utilization across the infrastructure has improved. By enabling the hospital to access its information on demand, St. Joseph's is able to help thousands of patients each year by giving doctors access to critical patent data as needed.

St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center is a non-profit, 431-bed hospital and health care network, providing services to patients from Onondaga and 15 surrounding counties. Through prevention programmes and the latest diagnostic treatment procedures, St. Joseph's works with patients to achieve optimum long-term health. Winner of the National Research Corporation Consumer Choice Award for the past five consecutive years, St. Joseph's is designated a Magnet Hospital for Nursing Excellence by the American Nurses Credentialing Center, the highest honour bestowed on a hospital for nursing care.

The desire by businesses to access, manage, deliver, secure and store information more efficiently is driving rapid change in the IT marketplace. Traditional low-tech, hardware-only approaches by proprietary vendors are meeting with resistance as companies grappling with new government mandates and business demands strive to capture and integrate information in a more seamless, real-time fashion across the enterprise. IBM's information on demand approach combines deep business insight with open standards, advanced storage systems, and sophisticated software for information, security and IT system management to create cost-effective and flexible information infrastructures. Regardless of industry, IBM helps companies transform data into insight to enable information on demand.

More news on IBM is available in this VMW issue's article IBM Systems creates server solution for Byram Healthcare.