Client: Salem Hospital Regional Health Services Challenge: To provide remote-managed hosting services for Salem’s mission-critical Epic clinical applications. Solution: CSC accurately scoped and built a remote hosting platform that went live flawlessly and now supports the hospital 24/7. Results: Salem Hospital now has a robust, high-availability environment to support its vision of high-quality patient care. Hospital personnel can focus on providing that care while CSC efficiently manages all network, server and database issues. Want more information? Learn more about CSC’s Managed Hosting Services. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.

Midnight, December 1, 2006: With the flip of a switch, Salem Hospital Regional Health Services in Salem, Ore., moved to an automated, 24/7 patient-care system that integrates information from across hospital departments to provide a single, longitudinal electronic record for every patient. The highly patient-centric approach, based on Epic Systems’ enterprise clinical suite of applications, automates nearly every aspect of hospital-based care to give providers the tools and up-to-date information they need for safe, high-quality patient care.

Behind Salem Hospital’s cutting-edge clinical system is a CSC data center in Chantilly, Va., with a cluster of Unix and Windows devices including more than 35 Citrix servers housing Salem’s Epic applications and associated databases. A robust, high-speed wide area network connects the data center to the hospital – making this the first commercially hosted, remotely supported Epic Systems environment in the healthcare industry.

The successful go-live was the culmination of a partnership that began in early 2006 when Salem Hospital – a regional medical center offering top medical services to people in and around Oregon’s Willamette Valley – decided to upgrade its IT systems and move toward a high-availability, mission-critical computing model. In general, such a system would be hosted locally or on site. But Salem Hospital had some unique concerns about its data center facility and the shortage of data center management resources, and decided to look for a partner with proven capabilities in managed hosting and network services.


The freedom to focus on patient care
Explains CSC’s Keith Packer, an account manager with CSC’s Managed Hosting Services, “Salem realized that if they were going to be automating their entire patient-care process over the next few years, they needed to have an organization like CSC to provide a world-class data center service, manage it end to end and take complete responsibility for it so they could focus on automating and improving the hospital’s processes.”

In February 2006, after a stringent selection process, Salem Hospital signed a seven-year, $8.9 million agreement with CSC to provide managed hosting services for the hospital’s Epic Systems clinical applications. “It takes about a year to build an application based on Epic for your own organization,” says Steve Edison, an account executive in CSC’s Healthcare Consulting practice. “In parallel, CSC’s team of project managers, systems engineers, service delivery personnel and network security specialists worked to get our data center environment configured for Salem’s customized Epic applications.”


From scope to build to test: The phases of managed hosting
The first step was to accurately scope the environment that CSC would be hosting on Salem’s behalf. “We needed to work very closely with Epic Systems and Salem Hospital to understand the technical and user requirements, then bring together the right expertise from CSC to match those requirements,” explains Packer. “Once we had scoped and sized the platform, we began the build process.”

This involved complex coordination with CSC’s network provider and hardware/software vendors to deploy the hardware that CSC was purchasing on Salem’s behalf in the CSC data center in Chantilly, Va. – a process that had to be completed by June 2006. “The June milestone was very critical to Salem, because from that point on, they needed to build and load the Epic application,” says Packer. “It was an aggressive deadline for CSC to meet, but we made it happen – and the client was very happy.”

From June until the end of November 2006, CSC supported Salem Hospital in the build process, working with both Epic and the development team at Salem to fine-tune the Epic environment to the hospital’s specialized needs. Because the Epic applications are used by every member of the hospital team – from administrators to doctors to nurses and dieticians – they all contributed in customizing the tools and interfaces. Says Edison, “CSC’s engineers and data center personnel worked and tested each component with Salem’s build team, with Epic and with the hospital’s users – over and over again – to ensure the technical integrity of the system.”


A critical lifeline
Providing hosting and network services is always a mission-critical task, but in this case, “mission critical” took on a new meaning. “We knew that when we flipped that switch, patient care was dependent upon CSC’s network and computers. There was no room for error; no second chances. It had to be flawless,” says Edison.

Because this was the industry’s first remotely supported Epic solution, CSC also had to provide strong service level guarantees to mitigate Salem Hospital’s concerns about performance issues arising from the distance between Oregon and Virginia. As a next step, CSC is looking to build a disaster recovery environment in a second data center, to add even greater resiliency and failover capability to the network.

Says Dennis Sato, Salem Hospital’s vice president and chief information officer, “Crucial to Salem’s vision of implementing a patient-centric care system was the tremendous depth of experience CSC was able to bring in managing infrastructure, networks and servers. We understood early on that CSC had this critical expertise, and they’ve lived up to our trust.”