Data Synchronization Powers Critical Healthcare Systems

By Elizabeth Lipp
November 2004

Emerging Health Information Technology ("EHIT") is a leading provider of healthcare technology to hospitals and healthcare organizations. Based in Yonkers, NY, EHIT offers a broad range of products and services and a strong relationship-based commitment to our clients. Combining many years of industry and technical expertise, they provide leading-edge technology solutions in response to the complex pressures and demands facing healthcare organizations today. Their priority is to address their patients most pressing needs rapidly and cost effectively while maintaining the highest level of patient care. EHIT's experience in supporting the Clinical and Financial Systems needs of major Medical Centers, Medical Departments and Clinical Networks has significantly contributed to positioning EHIT as a leader in the field.

This past March, EHIT has deployed the GoldenGate Data Synchronization solution within their data center in Yonkers, New York. A wholly owned subsidiary of 1000-bed, Montefiore Medical Center, EHIT maintains all IT and data functions for one of the very few 100 percent computerized physician order entry (CPOE) facilities in the country, supporting healthcare providers across the continuum of administration and care, including registration, laboratory, medicine, surgery, pediatrics, oncology and intensive care. EHIT relies on GoldenGate Data Synchronization to ensure disaster recovery capabilities, essential to 100 percent continuous data availability on its critical infrastructure.

"GoldenGate served two purposes for our needs," Dr, Eran Bellin, EHIT's director of Medical Informatics, told DBTA. "In addition to extracting information, it allows us to track delivery of care while also providing high quality data across time." GoldenGate also supports sub-second data capture and movement to the EHIT decision support engine, driving informatics for decision support and outcome analysis for patient care management.

In recent years, CPOE and clinical information systems (CIS) have enabled a select number of large hospitals and medical centers to substantially lower costs related to patient registration and administration, and automate a wide range of clinical tasks-including placing medication orders, scheduling diagnostic tests, and screening for drug interactions. For example, using the IDX LastWord system, Montefiore Medical Center has achieved reductions of preventable medication errors greater than 70 percent.

For small and mid-sized hospitals (below 500 beds) however, the technology investment required for CPOE and a comprehensive CIS system can be challenging, both financially and logistically. EHIT has pioneered a business model that promises these institutions access to CPOE, CIS and other cutting-edge healthcare systems by sharing the cost of infrastructure and maintenance among a group of facilities. The financial and logistical barriers have been removed by linking member hospitals through high-speed networks. This consortium model will enable EHIT to build on the state-of-the-art technology systems it developed and implemented in recent years with Montefiore Medical Center.

EHIT launched its consortium-based services and technologies in 2003 with a deployment at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center in New York, including CPOE and other enterprise clinical and administrative functionality using LastWord running on an HP NonStop platform, as well as a complete fiber optic infrastructure. An expansion of Bronx-Lebanon system is underway, and EHIT is seeking to secure additional deployments in the near future, in conjunction with an agreement with IDX Information Systems Corporation to market the IDX LastWord system to hospitals with less than 400 beds in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

"Sophisticated information technologies are bringing substantial cost savings to healthcare management, and driving many beneficial advancements within critical areas of clinical care," said Jack Wolf, CEO of EHIT. "But if doctors and caregivers are going to rely on automated systems in healthcare settings, it is absolutely essential to have industrial-strength technologies that will stay up and running at all times. GoldenGate is absolutely key to EHIT because it is a cost-effective solution for the data synchronization required to make our systems bulletproof. With GoldenGate synchronizing every transaction on our NonStop/IDX solution, our hospital customers won't have to worry about disaster-related downtime or systems outages."

In addition to supporting business continuity within EHIT's architecture, GoldenGate is also used to continuously synchronize data from the company's HP NonStop databases to a Sybase data warehouse used for decision support and report generation. With this synchronized clinical and administrative data, the EHIT team is able to use a number of tools and applications to produce detailed analytic reports to track patient metrics, length of stay, and other care management data.

"The ability to move data across diverse databases and environments is fundamental to uncovering important information, and gauging performance and outcomes," said Bellin. "GoldenGate delivers superior, real-time, synchronization capabilities, and we expect that the GoldenGate platform will continue to play a central role as we expand our statistical and analytical "Our ability to extract data and use it in real-time to such an extent really sets us apart from most organizations, Wolf added. "Whenever we travel and go to trade events, we get a huge following. This is a business model that works. And this is what this whole effort of extracting and using real-time information is all about."

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