Geisinger Health System

Healthcare Provider Uses Sun Java CAPS to Accelerate Access to Patient Information

Geisinger Health System is one of largest rural health providers in the nation, delivering services to 2.6 million people who live in a 20,000-square-mile region in central and northeastern Pennsylvania. Founded in 1915, Geisinger comprises three hospitals (including a Level 3 Trauma Center), 878 beds, and 40 community practice sites — staffed by 12,000 employees and nearly 800 doctors. In 2008, Geisinger had nearly 3 million outpatient encounters and earned $1.9 billion in revenue.

Customer Challenges

Boost the level of patient care
Simplify data sharing between disparate systems, departments, and sites
Provide a single view of patient data

Solution

Geisinger deployed a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that provides for communication between more than 100 applications and created a single patient index for all of its hospitals and clinics. To further enhance patient care in the area, Geisinger used its flexible and scalable Sun solution to build the nation's first rural Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) that facilitates the exchange of patients' records with hospitals outside of the Geisinger Health System.

Business Results

Increased patient and employee satisfaction
Provided instant access to a unified patient record
Created a scalable master index that includes more than 3 million records
Reduced interface development by approximately 150%
Sped some lab cycles from days to hours
Decreased the potential for medical errors and unnecessary tests
Leveraged existing IT investments
Gained the ability to share data with regional and national hospitals
Enabled new levels of research

Products and Services

Story Details

When you're in the business of saving lives, you can't afford delays in accessing patient information. A nationally recognized leader in healthcare, Geisinger Health System was one of the first healthcare organizations to implement an electronic medical record (EMR) system when it did so over ten years ago. Even though the EMR system eliminated many inefficiencies, electronic patient information was not easily shared between disparate clinical, administrative, and third-party insurance systems. As a result, employees had to manually enter or scan data numerous times, which increased the potential for error.

Another challenge facing Geisinger was that its other locations maintained their own patient index and assigned each patient a unique ID number. Because patients were often treated at more than one location, patient data could be spread across multiple files and locations, with no easy way for consolidation. Not only was this frustrating for clinicians and patients, but a lack of real-time access to a patient's complete medical record could slow diagnosis and result in unnecessary tests.

" Geisinger could not be the medical center that it is today without Java CAPS. The fact that you can go anywhere in this hospital system and bring up a patient's entire medical record is a huge help. Our ability to broker, massage, and connect to dissimilar systems is absolutely necessary for creating a best-of-breed hospital. "

— Duane Koble, Systems Integration and Support Team Lead, Geisinger Health System

Geisinger decided to create a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to connect disparate applications and to create one integrated patient index. After evaluating numerous SOA products, Geisinger chose the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Not only was Java CAPS already in use at several prestigious hospitals, but Java CAPS could also communicate using the protocols that Geisinger's applications used - TCP/IP and SNA.

To help offset the additional staffing requirements needed to build the SOA, Geisinger engaged Sun Professional Services. "We have used Sun Professional Services a lot over the years to help with our EMR and Web services," notes Duane Koble, systems integration and support team lead at Geisinger. IT personnel worked with Sun consultants to deploy the Enterprise Service Bus in Java CAPS, which serves as a data translator between applications. Next, the team used adapters in Java CAPS for HL7, Oracle, Batch, and SNA to connect 130 applications to the Enterprise Service Bus. After the SOA architecture was complete, IT personnel used Sun Master Index software in Java CAPS to consolidate the disparate patient indexes into a single index that includes 3.02 million medical records.

As a result of its SOA, Geisinger has only one medical record for each patient, which speeds efficiency, especially in the emergency room. "When you pop into an ER outside of our system, they don't know anything about you," says Koble. "But if one of our patients comes to a Geisinger ER, we immediately know everything about that patient's medical history. Having one medical record for patients has also allowed us to perform data mining to diagnose some diseases that travel along family lines."

Java CAPS can be easily configured to include additional identities, and new system interfaces can be built in less than one month. "We've surprised some application vendors because we say, 'How do you want the data? Okay, no problem,'" notes Koble. Employee productivity and efficiency have increased in other areas too, which boosts patient safety and convenience as well as employee satisfaction. For example, because of faster data submission times and a single patient record, one lab has reduced the time required to obtain results from certain tests from one week to three hours. Duplicate data entry has also decreased and billing cycles have been dramatically shortened because insurance claims are submitted on the day services are rendered.

By scaling its SOA, Geisinger has also been able to create the first rural Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) whose participating hospitals share patient data. To help with the ongoing expansion of its SOA, Other IT plans include a migration of the SOA from its current architecture - one Sun Fire V490 server and three Sun Fire V880 servers, which all run the Solaris 9 Operating System - to two Sun Fire T5240 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. Not only does Geisinger want to take advantage of chip-multithreading processors, but Solaris Containers - the built-in virtualization technology in the Solaris 10 OS - can also reduce application licensing costs.