SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Leading healthcare delivery organizations, hospitals and medical centers are relying on Sun Microsystems, Inc. systems and software, including Solaris(TM), the most advanced operating system in the industry, to ensure the highest degree of availability and security as they work to modernize their clinical records systems. Sun is helping leading health care providers to securely manage the patient data for hundreds of thousands of patients annually, including: The Children's Hospital, The Queen's Medical Center (QMC), and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB). Sun's expertise in sophisticated IT platforms combined with the premier software and services of Epic Systems Corporation provides a secure platform for enterprise-wide health care information systems, which include electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) technologies to help reduce medical errors, increase operational efficiencies and improve patient care.
"When it comes to evaluating an IT provider, hospitals have stringent requirements for security, up-time and value," said Mike Haymaker, global healthcare industry manager at Sun. "Clearly, the word is getting out that Sun provides the ideal IT platform for large-scale patient care applications."
The Queen's Medical Center (QMC) is the oldest and largest private hospital in Hawaii and serves patients from across the state and the Pacific region. Overall applications functionality and adherence to stringent Service Level Metrics for reliability and performance were the driving factors when QMC chose Epic Systems as its EMR solution provider.
"We are delighted that the Epic system is offered on the Sun platform so that we can utilize the entire spectrum of Solaris Operating System features," said Ken Kudla, CIO and vice president of Information Technology, The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. "You can't beat Sun for reliability and scalability."
The Children's Hospital in Denver, Colorado, is nationally ranked as one of the best children's hospitals by U.S. News & World Report and Child Magazine. As a pediatric healthcare system licensed for 236 beds, Children's offers patients and families a network that includes five community-based after-hour care sites, eight specialty-care centers and more than 400 outreach clinics held in three states each year. In 2003, the hospital began implementing a four-year plan to replace its hospital information system (HIS) and introduce a full electronic medical record and physician order entry system.
What was needed at The Children's Hospital was a technology infrastructure that delivered true utility-type computing. Today at Children's, an active-passive cluster pair of Sun Fire(TM) 6800 servers powers its integrated HIS and EMR. Epic Systems is the system vendor. To date more than 1,500 health care providers have been trained to use the new information systems and there have been absolutely no performance or availability issues.
"Three leading hardware vendors were evaluated and Sun Microsystems was chosen for its proven performance, reliability, support, and excellent value," said Mike Blaskowski, Data Services manager at The Children's Hospital. "The Sun Fire 6800 servers have fully met our expectations and given us the tools to deliver truly high availability computing in all of our environments of care, from ambulatory clinics to our emergency department and beyond."
The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) serves more than 800,000 patients a year across an 85-acre campus that includes six hospitals, four schools and numerous research centers. The faculty and staff who work at UTMB utilize a variety of Sun systems, including Sun Fir 6900 servers and several Sun Fire 4800 servers running the Solaris Operating System to implement and host two of the most mission critical systems, an Epic Electronic Medical Records system and Peoplesoft ERP applications.
"For over 100 years UTMB has been committed to caring for the people of Texas," said Mark Syers, Leader UTMB Desktop and Enterprise Services. "In order to continue our distinguished level of care, we knew that investing in the right technology was critical. The emergency room handled 71,000 emergency room visits just in the last year, and the hospitals cared for thousands of patients and we will be relying on the scalable and flexible systems powered by Epic and Sun technology to help us maintain this service to the state of Texas."
Sun will be at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)Conference in Dallas, Texas in booth #1013 from February 14-17. For more information on Sun in healthcare, please visit: http://www.sun.com/healthcare .
Sun in Healthcare
Sun Microsystems and its iForce partners are committed to delivering innovative technology solutions to meet the latest IT needs of health care providers. Sun's infrastructure offerings are helping health care facilities improve the efficiency of the services they deliver and ensure best-in-class patient care. From radio frequency identification (RFID) to electronic medical record (EMR), Sun is leading the way in offering health care practitioners the next generation technology.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer(TM)" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com/ .
NOTE: Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Sun Fire, iForce and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the US and other countries.
CONTACT: Kimberly Evans Sun Microsystems +1-415-762-2270 kim.evans@sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc.CONTACT: Kimberly Evans of Sun Microsystems, +1-415-762-2270, orkim.evans@sun.com
Web site: http://www.sun.com/healthcare
Web site: http://sun.com/