Two years ago, after a decade of tremendous growth, Aurora Health Care knew it needed a major upgrade to its enterprise IT infrastructure. Its volume of users and interface transactions had more than tripled in the past year, sophisticated new services had been added and the organization faced an increasing challenge to meet its commitment to helping its network of more than 600 physicians collaborate with each other in order to improve patient care.

High availability, reliability, response time and security were critical to Aurora's mission of promoting health, preventing illness, and providing state-of-the-art diagnoses and treatment.

Aurora called upon its technology solutions provider for more than 10 years, Hewlett-Packard (HP), along with Cerner and IDX Systems, to provide the solutions that would enable the health system to meet those challenges.

Business challenges
Cerner Millennium health information management (HIM) applications running on HP OpenVMS-based AlphaServer systems were installed at Aurora to shift its patient information from paper to electronic records that were available all the time, and at every facility. Aurora now stores almost three terabytes of production data in an Oracle database, which supports the Cerner applications and provides a seamless patient record. Aurora has become one of the largest HP OpenVMS users within the Cerner customer base, using OpenVMS systems with Cerner Millennium supported by an HP StorageWorks SAN. 

"Think of the value to a patient arriving to an emergency room when a physician has the ability to pull up the patient's history in an instant vs. not being able to find the patient's history quickly, if at all," said Eric Ried, Aurora's Technical Architect for Cerner. "Aurora has 13 hospitals and 130 clinics, and 3.5 million patient records. As you can imagine, capacity and reliability are critical to our business and IT systems. The number of users and data transactions we process has virtually doubled in the last two years."

Lee Oettinger, manager of technical services, added, "On the first day of production, the IDX Flowcast systems, also running on the HP OpenVMS AlphaServer systems, were put into place to facilitate billing, registration and scheduling across all of Aurora's clinics. This system now supports more than 3,500 users and has proven its worth in increased efficiencies in both the business and patient care environments." 

"We now also have the ability to write prescriptions electronically instead of interpreting someone's handwriting. Our electronic intensive care unit (eICU) initiative allows critical care to be monitored remotely and across all of our facilities," said Ried. "Aurora is first in the state to offer the service, which means improved patient care at reduced costs." 

Reid continued, "Just as important, we have not experienced any downtime due to security issues. Viruses are simply a non-issue with OpenVMS. Hackers are a non-issue. It's something we don't have to worry about. It's important that we eliminate any downtime that could impede our ability to save someone's life."

According to Jeff Warren, director of technical services, "Relying on HP's OpenVMS helps Aurora keep up with demand. It allows us to expand and grow, delivering reliable computing and better healthcare." 

The move to integrity
Today, thousands of hospitals are using HP OpenVMS systems to handle their enterprise and departmental information processing needs. In fact, according to HIMSS research, the OpenVMS operating system is used in 20 percent of hospitals throughout the United States.  

In addition, HP has begun to offer OpenVMS on its entry-class Itanium 2-based Integrity servers, and the operating system will be available on the high-end and midrange Integrity server line by September 2005. Health systems will be able to run the same applications on both AlphaServer systems and HP Integrity servers.

"Having OpenVMS available on the Integrity server platform will be great for the longevity of OpenVMS," according to David Harrold, Open VMS technical lead for Cerner. "In our particular environment, we need the biggest Integrity servers we can find. I'm excited about the possibilities." 

Aurora isn't alone in this regard. More than 90 percent of HP's OpenVMS customers continue to buy AlphaServer systems and many are currently planning to move to the Integrity server platform.  

"We have been scaling up with OpenVMS and plan to continue to do so," Harrold said. "The system has helped us to fulfill our mission to improve individual wellness for our patients and to meet our business challenges. We consider HP a partner in our growth, working with us to provide solutions for better access to patient information. As we grow, OpenVMS will be there every step of the way." 

Mr. Harrold is lead systems engineer, Open VMS technical lead for Cerner.
Mr. Oettinger is manager of technical services and program manager for Cerner.
Mr. Ried is technical architect for Cerner.
Mr. Sirianni is program manager for IDX.
Mr. Warren is director of technical service for IDX.