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St. Anthony’s Medical Center Ensures Technology Infrastructure is Prepared to Support EMR
St. Anthony’s Medical Center is the third largest medical center in St. Louis comprised of St. Anthony’s Medical Center (767 beds), four urgent care centers, and 880 affiliated physicians including 70 employed in 20 practices. It serves more than 800,000 residents in St. Louis County, southern communities, and several counties in southwest Illinois; is staffed by more than 4,000 employees; and is served by more than 800 physicians and other medical professionals in private practice.
St. Anthony’s Medical Center
Gordon Lashmett, CIO
“Aspen Advisors has considerable experience in infrastructure planning and implementation. With their assistance, St. Anthony’s was able to ensure its technology infrastructure was prepared to support iCare, our EMR, and the new clinical computing environment. We now have high availability technology architecture and data center plans to support the evolving needs of the organization.”
THE CHALLENGE
As a result of its Strategic Information Technology plan, St. Anthony’s had made investments in Epic’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR), an initiative they call iCare. St. Anthony’s anticipated the demand for its technology infrastructure, including mass storage, high availability and redundancy, and data center space would grow even further with the expanded use of digital and document imaging applications and the planned deployment of iCare. As such, St. Anthony’s wanted an independent third party assessment of its plans related to its technology infrastructure.
THE SOLUTION
Because of its experience in healthcare technology consulting, infrastructure planning and implementation, Aspen Advisors was engaged to develop a Technology Roadmap to establish the guiding principles and plan for ensuring St. Anthony’s infrastructure would support the new clinical computing environment. The assessment and plan included considerations for high availability, data storage, data center needs, remote access, the security model, the Citrix vendor solution, and the Single Sign-On approach (SSO), among others. Specific engagement objectives included:
- Validating St. Anthony’s approach to data storage architecture, replication, fail-over, and SAN management practices including:
- Reviewing the radiology and cardiology PACS archive with respect to their configuration with the two enterprise SANs;
- Determining five-year diagnostic imaging image storage capacity needs based on service and market share growth;
- Defining the impact of the advanced clinical applications on investments in data storage;
- Defining options for enterprise data management; and
- Defining the storage migration plan, timeline, and supporting cost estimates and resource requirements.
- Defining high availability and disaster recovery options;
- Reviewing downtime procedures;
- Developing a data center plan, budget, and growth assumptions;
- Confirming / evaluating remote access plans;
- Determining the Single Sign-On approach and selection of the SSO application;
- Reviewing the current state for the Citrix vendor solution for the virtualized environment to support SSO and Hyperspace use for clinical kiosk workstations and remote access;
- Evaluating network infrastructure and workstation and printer readiness; and
- Reviewing helpdesk current and future operations plans.
THE RESULTS
As a result of the engagement, St. Anthony’s had Technology Plan based on current and future anticipated requirements to ensure the major technology infrastructure components required for the iCare EMR were planned, budgeted, and coordinated with the iCare implementation plan. This included:
- A well-documented high availability architecture and leadership understanding of the high availability application services;
- A PACS upgrade plan and vendor contract negotiation including hardware, configuration, and data migration;
- A documented plan for enterprise data storage requirements based on the SAN assessment;
- An evaluation and upgrade plan for the data network services to support the high availability requirements;
- An updated disaster recovery plan (including downtime procedures) with consideration for the Epic EMR being implemented as well as other core applications;
- An approach for remote access, Single Sign-On, and a Citrix vendor solution for the virtualized environment;
- Determination of the data center levels of services, assessment of current data center design and services, an application and server roadmap with three to four year assumptions; high-level capacity planning for data center spatial, electrical, cooling, and environmental needs; and a high-level data center budget plan; and
- A multi-year capital and operating budget to support the plan.
