University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System

Pressure in the healthcare industry to cut costs has never been greater, but the need to securely deliver the right information to the right person at the right time is critical to delivering safe, effective patient care. "In order to make good health care decisions and take care of patients better, you have to have the right information at the point of care in order to provide the highest quality of care you can," says Dr. Michael Waldrum, COO of UAB Health System.

UAB is an integrated network of healthcare entities that manages patient medical, financial, and benefit information, as well as hundreds of ancillary systems. UAB Information Services manages the inventory of these systems, enabling them to share information and keep operations flowing. "UAB is a super-charged high intensity place," adds Dr. Waldrum. "We’re never satisfied with where we are and we continously want to improve the way we care for patients and how we use information to improve that care delivery."

Maintaining patient and business information is vital yet challenging with facilities spread geographically. With the growing demands of electronic medical records and patient lab, radiology and ancillary systems, UAB required an integrated solution that could meet diverse interoperability requirements, while at the same time help to lower system maintenance and development costs. "What Sun gives us, in one word, is integration—the ability for us to share our clinical information from the outpatient side to the inpatient side," explains Joan Hicks, CIO of UAB Health System. "It makes information available to all the clinicians who are involved in the patient care. And we have definitely achieved benefits from our Sun purchases through return on investment, the longevity of the products, and the low maintenance costs."

UAB deployed over 600 Sun Ray clients for patient information access and plans to add more than 3,000 over two years. UAB uses Sun Java System Identity Manager to integrate with the Sun Java System Portal Server and the Sun Ray clients. Sun Java System Identity Manager and Sun Java System Portal Server are part of the Solaris Enterprise System, which also includes the Solaris 10 Operating System and integration software. To enable integration of legacy systems, UAB uses Java CAPS and Sun SeeBeyond eGate Integrator. "With Java and Sun’s Java CAPS integration engine, we can deploy the Web and utilize Web tools that allow us to give information to our providers quicker and at a lower cost," says Dr. Waldrum. "We can also build incrementally without having to rebuild the underlying infrastructure and change legacy systems. Using Sun tools we’ve been able to take information in disparate systems and aggregate it at the enterprise level, so it rolls up to the patient level and its available across the enterprise for that patient. And with Sun Ray clients, we can decrease the amount of time it takes to get the information, and provide it with less maintenance cost. Having the information available improves health care because clinicians can make more informed decisions. Additionally if that information can come to them easier then it improves their efficiency, so they can do more and be more productive."