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.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Sun Ray, iForce,
and The
Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun
Microsystems, Inc., in the US and other countries.
|
