Dell, Teradata, Brocade Focus on Healthcare Tech

The healthcare industry is increasingly looking to IT vendors to help them manage the influx of patient data, as well as the shift to electronic health records. Dell, Teradata and Brocade all unveiled news announcements at the 2013 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference underway this week in New Orlean. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #HIMSS13.

Dell joins forces for Electronic Healthcare Records

Dell announced that it has joined forces with  with Red Hat, Intel and VMware to open a dedicated center where hospitals can test and deploy a new option for running Epic Systems’ electronic health records (EHR) software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The DRIVE (Dell, Red Hat, Intel and VMware for Epic) Center of Excellence is located near the EHR vendor’s Verona, Wisconsin headquarters. Red Hat Enterprise was recently added to the list of target platforms for Epic, and its Linux option provides a cost-effective option for hospitals.  VMware vSphere is the leading healthcare virtualization platform and Dell provides a full range of professional services and support for every stage of EHR deployments.

"The new alternative of running Epic on Linux with the latest generation of Intel x86 servers meets the needs of mission-critical healthcare solutions," said Rick Cnossen, worldwide director of health IT for Intel. "The DRIVE Center of Excellence provides hospitals with an efficient way to evaluate an open platform based on industry standards, with ecosystem expertise available for ongoing support."

Teradata selected by CHRISTUS

Teradata (TDC) announced that Integrated Delivery Network provider CHRISTUS has selected Teradata and Claraview for designing and implementing its new healthcare analytics platform. Featuring hardware, software, data utilities and consulting services, the new data warehouse analytics platform will help the healthcare leader evolve beyond traditional healthcare technology thinking. CHRISTUS expects this to generate deeper insight and result in improved patient care.

The new information solution includes the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance platform, a Teradata Healthcare Logical Data Model (HC-LDM), a Teradata Data Mart Appliance for Test and Development, and Teradata Claraview’s consulting services to map clinical data into the HC-LDM as well as deploy analytics across the organization.

"Our strategic goal is to integrate our siloed data sources into a single data warehouse in order to support and measure clinical protocols across the institution and leverage our evidence-based care pathways to improve the quality of patient care," said Mavis Girlinghouse, CHRISTUS Analytics Director. "We awarded the contract to Teradata and Claraview due to their extensive healthcare data warehousing and business intelligence expertise in addition to their relevant industry experience working with health systems with similar challenges and objectives."

Brocade selected by Singing River Health Systems

Brocade (BRCD) announced that  Singing River Health System has strengthened its business continuity and disaster recovery systems with Brocade networking solutions, implementing 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) performance using Brocade VDX and Brocade FCX switches in the data center and at the campus edge. To support a rapidly growing infrastructure Singing River chose Brocade VDX switches for the non-blocking architecture that enables the organization to scale the fabric one switch at a time. By using Brocade VDX switches on both sides of the network, the organization is able to provide end users with low latency and maximum availability.

"The objectives for our uptime are pretty stringent, so we need the reliable, fast network we currently have. In addition, we were able to beat the industry standard of 15 seconds for login time by more than 50 percent, by reaching seven seconds after leveraging Brocade VCS Fabric technology. We can provide a business continuity and disaster recovery setup that has a failover time in the range of seconds," said Aaron Marsden, network and database administrator, Singing River Health System. "It's been fantastic working with Brocade and we're very pleased."