Four IDX Carecast customers satisfy critical health information needs with high-availability technology

March 21, 2005

With its combination of scalability, unsurpassed reliability, and a guarantee of 99.9 percent uptime, IDX Carecast is uniquely positioned to meet the demands of the healthcare organization in the twenty-first century. Carecast runs on the HP NonStop platform, distinguished by its enterprise-ready, continuously available, linearly scalable servers.

The experiences of many IDX customers—often spanning a decade or more of system use—speak to the extraordinary reliability of Carecast and its predecessor, IDX LastWord, combined with the NonStop platform.

The Nebraska Medical Center serves more than a quarter of the Omaha-area market through its hospital, 22 clinics, and 350-physician faculty practice. The organization's Carecast electronic medical record system encompasses both ambulatory and inpatient care, and is used by 5,000 healthcare professionals. The organization is also distinguished as an early adopter of portable electronic medical record technology, which gives patients a password-protected, portable version of key information from their integrated inpatient and outpatient health record. "The IDX technology platform has never caused us a moment of unplanned downtime in 10 years. Our positive experience with system reliability strongly influenced our decision to upgrade from LastWord to Carecast two years ago, and has continued to this day," says Jim Veline, executive director of Information Technology, Nebraska Medical Center. "With IDX, we have the mission-critical performance that supports our clinicians and advances our progress towards a paperless record. In addition, we've consistently maintained subsecond response times, ensuring that our system supports the fast pace of patient care."

Montefiore Medical Center, a 1,062-bed, three-hospital academic health system, is one of the leading organizations using Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) in the United States, with virtually 100 percent of inpatient orders entered electronically and 2,500 physicians participating. Using the LastWord enterprise system on NonStop servers, Montefiore estimates it has reduced potential prescribing errors by 70 percent, and reduced by 60 percent the elapsed time from a physician issuing a medication order to the patient receiving the medication. In addition, CPOE has resulted in annual productivity savings at Montefiore that are estimated at US$2.5 million a year. "When Montefiore first began our CPOE project, we knew that system reliability would be essential, and that's one reason we chose IDX and NonStop servers," said Dorrie Napoleone, Montefiore Medical Center’s director of Clinical Applications. "In the eight years since our go-live, our NonStop servers have delivered 99.9 percent uptime as guaranteed in our contract with IDX. This reliable performance has helped us to prevent unscheduled downtimes significantly and has supported our successful use of CPOE with IDX software." In addition, Montefiore will be using NonStop servers to create a full backup repository of all data, to ensure that the information remains available during scheduled downtimes, and to support appropriate measures for disaster recovery of patient data.

Emerging Health Information Technology (EHIT), a separate business arm of Montefiore Medical Center, offers consulting and hosting services to other hospitals embarking on CPOE and electronic medical records. EHIT has deployed NonStop servers to support the use of LastWord at the 560-bed Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center, which is currently close to 80 percent live on CPOE.

Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network (LVHHN) uses the LastWord clinical information system across its three community teaching hospitals to support computerized physician order entry, combined with wireless barcode medication charting to safeguard against errors during medication administration. LVHHN is also one of the 100 Most Wired Hospitals in the United States, as designated by the Hospitals & Health Networks' Most Wired Survey and Benchmarking Study, 2004. LVHHN estimates its combined use of CPOE and barcode charting has reduced medication errors by 44 percent. System reliability has been vital to clinician acceptance of CPOE at LVHHN. The organization recently announced an upgrade to Carecast to support its further development of a completely paperless electronic medical record system across its hospitals, including use of interdisciplinary care plans. "Our IDX system simply doesn't go down unless we bring it down for regular maintenance—and this has been our experience for more than a decade," said Sandy Haldeman, LVHHN’s director of the Carecast Upgrade project. "Our clinicians depend on the reliability of IDX software and NonStop servers to keep the electronic medical record, computerized physician order entry, wireless medication barcode charting, and other clinical functionality up and running. These systems are essential for direct patient care."

Built on 25 years of innovation, IDX Carecast provides integrated delivery networks, academic medical centers, and hospitals with clinical software solutions to automate workflow and enable rapid access to patient information. Carecast solutions help institutions achieve clinical excellence by improving the accuracy of information, promoting patient safety, and achieving greater operational efficiencies. Most critically, Carecast enhances patient care via a system that delivers unsurpassed reliability and response time.

To find out more, see the recent IDX Carecast press release or visit the IDX Carecast product page.

This news is published on NonStop Computing websites. March 2005.