SOLUTIONS FROM COMPAQ

CHILDRENS HOSPITAL LOS ANGELES

From Patient Tracking to Telemedicine, Childrens Hospital Relies on Compaq

Childrens Hospital Los Angeles relies on a Compaq/Oracle-based data warehouse that tracks half a million appointments, hundreds of thousands of patient records, and tremendous amounts of information about medications, diagnoses, protocols and medical procedures. Real-time access to this information requires the power and manageability of Compaq ProLiant servers.

Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) is the largest U.S. pediatric emergency transport system and LA County's only Level I Trauma Center devoted exclusively to children and adolescents. In the ambulatory clinics alone, CHLA receives more than 20,000 patients each year. Information about these patients, their appointments, diagnoses and medications was dispersed throughout the hospital until recently, when CHLA began consolidating these details into a rich clinical data warehouse used by numerous departments.

Throughout the hospital, administrators and researchers found more and more uses for the information being collected. As the number of applications based on the Oracle data warehouse multiplied, so did the number of employees using themÑeventually slowing system performance to a sometimes unbearable level. The hospital knew the existing hardware platform had to be replaced with a more reliable, flexible and scalable solution. A system this crucial to the hospital's business had to be able to grow with the applications it supported. Childrens Hospital took a hard look at its needs and chose Compaq.

Compaq reliability and scalability.
Dr. Mark Citron, manager of Oracle Development at CHLA, describes the hospital's primary needs in two words: reliability and scalability. With so many users relying on the information in the data warehouse, the new system had to ensure that the data was always safe and accessible.

CHLA found its answer in the Compaq ProLiant 4500. Built-in manageability features ensure that the system remains available, while proactively alerting system administrators to potential problems before they occur. Compaq also provides the industry's only pre-failure warranty, which replaces system components before they fail.

As for scalability, CHLA discovered room for tremendous performance boosts as the system is upgraded. The ability to add up to four processors, additional hot-pluggable disk drives, and memory makes it easy to expand the system. Also a consideration was the price of that increased performance. Dr. Citron notes that "Compaq price/performance has always been outstanding for us. We can support more than 100 simultaneous users on our Oracle database running on the ProLiant 4500."

Building on the Compaq/Oracle relationship.
The most important criteria, however, was the relationship between Compaq and Oracle. "The close cooperation between Compaq and Oracle is really critical for us," continued Dr. Citron, "in terms of making sure the hardware can support the software applications."

Seeing tangible results from the relationship between Compaq and Oracle helped reassure CHLA that Compaq hardware provides the best platform for its data warehouse and related applications. Thanks to cooperation between the companies, Oracle software can be installed and optimized using the Compaq SmartStart software that ships with all Compaq servers.

Such joint product development and optimization have led to recent proof that a Compaq ProLiant server running Oracle achieves the best price/performance of any hardware platform no surprise to CHLA.

Mission-critical proof.
Robert Welch, project lead for the Distributed Computing and Network Services department of CHLA, demonstrated dramatic performance improvements using a Compaq ProLiant server in a pilot project with a mission-critical appointment scheduling application.

"In the past," said Welch, "employees scheduling appointments were reluctant to rely on the automated system because of the speed issueÑespecially critical during an emergency." However, with Compaq ProLiant servers powering the system, the hospital could support twice as many users with far greater performance. Today, almost half a million appointments are stored in the database.

Other users also noticed a marked performance improvement. Some 800 users access demographic information stored in the data warehouse. The new Compaq platform hastened their real-time access to almost 300,000 patient records complete with department-specific comments, patient-family relationships, and insurance information.

The new system also enabled more simultaneous users to search records on 500 referring physicians, a formulary for 8,500 medications, diagnoses for 24,000 patients, and immunization records for 3,800 patientsÑnot to mention protocols, procedures, and observations. Researchers also track clinical episodes of care, tracking diagnosis, onset, and follow-up.

Because the pilot was so successful, departments throughout the hospital have come to rely on Compaq servers. Numerous additional in-house applications now access the Oracle data warehouse, and the hospital has begun migrating all UNIX servers to Compaq systems.

Investment protection.
In addition to the obvious performance improvements, Compaq provides multiple growth paths for new product releases, faster CPUs, and disk drive changes, all features that can be added without constantly re-engineering installations. Previous systems relied on third-party SCSI drivers, did not provide backwards compatibility, and had no built-in features for automatic disaster recovery.

"Compaq is the first vendor that took a look at the server market and thought, ÔWhat are the functions that our customers need?'" said Welch. "Unlike many of their competitors, who adapted a regular workstation for a server environment, Compaq specifically engineered a mid-range server solution with internal mechanisms for management, scalability and fault isolation."

Proactive manageability a big plus.
"In addition to a good hardware platform, Compaq also gives you a good manageability platform," Welch notes. "Compaq bundles SNMP-based network and system management tools into the software, so an administrator can be proactive rather than reactive."

The combination of Compaq's Insight Manager and the industry's only pre-failure warranty ensures that Welch can address problems before system components fail. After receiving an alert from the system, he can dial in and monitor the system's status. If, for example, a drive is approaching a critical failure point, Welch has time to replace it often under warranty before it fails. Users never realize a potential problem existed.

Choosing Compaq desktops for similar reasons.
"We wanted to implement a standard across the board for our Oracle development and production systems, the SCO UNIX and Novell NetWare environments, and in the future, Microsoft NT. Compaq is our vendor of choice because of the reliability of both its servers and its workstations," explains Welch.

CHLA has hundreds of Compaq ProLinea desktops deployed throughout the hospital and is adding another 300Ð500 Compaq Deskpro computers. With a five-person IT staff serving the whole hospital, using Compaq desktops allows Welch's team to work lean and smart. He indicates that "because of our trust in Compaq, we can quickly and confidently deploy new units rather than testing a couple of demo models every time."

"Building a solid infrastructure with Compaq."
The desktop upgrade is part of a hospital-wide migration to a client/server environment that will support not only Oracle-based GUI applications, but office automation applications as well, including WordPerfect, Microsoft Word and Excel, and a company-wide e-mail system.

Plans also include a hospital-wide intranet with Oracle WebServer software running on Compaq hardware. Through the intranet, hospital users will be able to access the Oracle-based applications through a Web browser.

"By building a solid infrastructure with Compaq," concludes Welch, "we are also laying the groundwork for exciting new applications like telemedicine and remote communication, where people can send and access digitized information 24 hours a day. Placing x-rays and 3D models in digital format and transmitting them to a doctor across the world brings us into a whole new realm of diagnosis and urgent care for the 21st century."

With the Compaq infrastructure for these new applications, CHLA can confidently move forward into the exciting future of medicine.

©1996 Compaq Computer Corporation. All rights reserved. Compaq and ProLiant are registered trademarks of Compaq Corporation. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. Microsoft and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered service marks of their respective companies. They do not represent an endorsement by Compaq Computer Corporation.

© Copyright 1996 Compaq Computer Corporation.
Revised: 12 December 1996