Q & A
Mike Haymaker, Global Healthcare Industry Manager, on Sun's Commitment to the Healthcare Industry
Q: How committed is Sun to the healthcare industry and what new initiatives are you unveiling now to help hospitals and hospital facilities become more efficient?
A: Sun has been in healthcare for more than a dozen years. Many of the premier healthcare solution vendors run on Sun and have for years. Virtually every hospital you've ever heard of has some Sun technology. We're involved in infrastructure technology for patient care and for administration in the hospital. Our Sun Ray ultra-thin client device is perfect when you think of physician mobility. And, when you think about how often a doctor moves throughout the hospital, the Sun Ray ultra-thin client can be a huge timesaver and it's really starting to catch on.
In terms of Sun's commitment to healthcare, we're doing quite a few things. We're in the process of establishing centers of excellence with key university hospitals in the mid west and the southeast. We are a sponsor and a partner with the HIMSS organization, which is the #1 healthcare membership organization in the United States - HIMSS has about 15,000 members.
Q: Why do you think that Healthcare facilities should be looking to Sun for their technology needs, what makes Sun stand out over other companies?
A: Sun is known as a technology innovator, and frankly if there's one industry in need of IT innovation, it's healthcare. And, when you think about Sun's vision and the idea of everything connected to the network - that makes a lot of sense in healthcare. Studies have proven that when doctors have the information they need at the point of care they can do a much better job for their patients. So hospitals are working hard to create and manage electronic medical records, and once they've done that they need a secure and reliable platform to run them on. That's what Sun is getting to be known for in the healthcare industry. Beyond that, there's lots of interest in innovative technologies like RFID in hospitals to track assets, patients, medical devices. RFID can be used to automate logging/monitoring types of tasks so that caregivers can focus on the patient. Sun's expertise is important because we play a key role in integrating RFID into the hospital's IT environment and help them avoid the "islands of information" problem.
Q: Let's talk a little about the Orthopedic Hospital of Oklahoma and the solution that they have in place now. Sun has worked with one of our iForce(SM) partners to implement an RFID solution to match the right medication to the right patient. What was Sun's role with this particular project?
A: At the Orthopedic Hospital of Oklahoma (OHO), Sun along with Creative Healthcare Systems provided the full IT infrastructure and the applications to automate the hospital. OHO is focused on finding ways to use innovative technologies, like RFID, to improve the patient's experience throughout their stay in the hospital. RFID helps to do this and to increase the productivity of hospital staff. When the patient is registered at the hospital he is issued a patient ID bracelet with an embedded RFID tag. Then as he progresses through the registration process and on to the hospital room, the RFID tag helps ensure that we know who the patient is and where he is put. When medication is administered again RFID can play help make sure that the right patient gets the right medication.
Q: So this is another clear example of how Sun is stepping up to the plate and helping the healthcare industry?
A: Right, Sun has had a long-standing commitment to the healthcare industry and we're always looking for new ways to show it. In fact one of the things we've done recently, about a year ago, we founded a healthcare IT user community called SunSHINE with the HIMSS organization. At this point, we have 1,200 external members - people from hospitals throughout the US and even some overseas - who are looking to Sun to bring innovation and new ideas into the healthcare market. To me that says very clearly that healthcare has an appetite for new ideas, and they really do view Sun as the company who can help with that.
Q: Can you give me a statement of Sun's commitment to healthcare?
A: Sun has a really strong commitment to healthcare and you'll often hear Scott McNealy mention healthcare as an example of an industry that needs automation, and an industry that Sun is specifically interested in. Every human being will eventually encounter the healthcare system; for ourselves or for our family. And it's clear that empowering doctors with information at the point of care when it really matters can dramatically improve the quality of the outcome. And that's what Sun intends to do.
Q: Is RFID overkill in healthcare - what about barcoding?
A: Even barcoding, which is an improvement over essentially no automation, requires that somebody remembers to scan the barcode. And barcoding can also be intrusive to a patient. You sometimes have to wake a patient up, have them stick their wrist out, so you can scan the barcode. That's compared to RFID where the patient doesn't have to be disturbed. At a minimum, RFID is another layer of assurance - a safety net - to ensure that you have the right patient and the right drug and the right treatment. And anything IT can do to minimize medical errors is of tremendous value in the healthcare industry.
Q: With leading hospitals and healthcare providers transferring sensitive records to online systems, how is Sun's technology addressing the need to guarantee adequate privacy for patients?
A: Privacy in healthcare is a critical issue. There is nothing more sacred, more private than someone's personal medical information. If someone's bank account number, for instance, is inadvertently disclosed you can close the bank account and get a new one. But when you think about patient privacy, once someone's medical history has been released there's just no way to take it back. So privacy is critical in healthcare. Sun is known for its strong focus on security and privacy. Through the Liberty Alliance, Sun is bringing the concept of federated network identity into healthcare. The concept that we can positively identify doctors and patients and labs and clinics when they access health information is a critical part of the process. It's fundamental to the trust required for healthcare to automate itself and to share medical records.
Q: Related to the topic of private medical records, what applications, systems and services has Sun introduced to the healthcare IT marketplace that ensures secure sharing of electronic medical records?
A: The idea of sharing electronic medical records over the Internet is Sun's sweet spot, that's really network computing, that's what we have 20 years of experience in doing. So we've learned very specifically how to make this work securely in markets like financial services, banking, and many other industries. What we bring to the table is the very strongest level of infrastructure security, with Solaris as the operating system and we have end-to-end security built into the Sun Ray.
Q: Many believe that European hospitals are ahead of the U.S. in adopting the latest sophisticated technology, when and how do you think that American healthcare facilities will catch up?
A: It's true that countries such as Spain, Italy and the UK are further along in sharing electronic health records over the Internet. However, there is a huge initiative now underway that's being promoted by the Department of Health and Human Services in the US to build a national health information network (NHII). That is going to help the US leapfrog, I believe, other countries in terms of sharing electronic medical records. And the NHII will be used for sharing not only text data but medical image data between labs and clinics and doctors and hospitals all in the name of improving patient care.
Q: The HIPAA deadline is approaching in April, how have Sun's customers prepared for this regulation? With so much data to keep track of, do you think that hospitals, in general, will be compliant in time?
A: The April 2005 upcoming HIPAA deadline is focused around technical security so hospitals are working hard to make sure that they are taking good care with passwords, that they are making sure that when somebody leaves the hospital that their user ID is deleted. Sun's Identity Management products can play a huge role in that in terms of helping automate and facilitate the process of either bringing someone on board as an employee and giving them authorization to access certain systems or to quickly delete them from the system when they leave.
Q: What does Sun envision that the hospital of the future will look like and when should we expect to really see it?
A: Sun's view of the hospital of the future goes back to Sun's vision for network computing and the idea of everything of value connected to the Internet. So our vision is that medical devices, patients through their ID bracelets, even babies will be tagged with RFID. Medical monitoring devices will directly connect to the hospitals computer systems so that nurses don't have to log the data coming out of monitoring devices. It's the idea of automating the input of all this data into the computer network so we can manage it and take better care of the patient.
Q: Where do you see Sun's healthcare customers investing their IT budgets?
A: Sun's healthcare customers spend most of their budget investing in clinical applications to improve patient care. They've also spent a lot of time and effort meeting the HIPAA requirements for privacy and security. But, basically their IT budgets are focused any place really where IT can help hospitals address their top issues: patient safety, regulatory compliance and caregiver productivity.
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