In healthcare, getting the right information faster can make all the difference. That’s what Advocate Health Care was after. Its staff needed faster, more secure and user-friendly access to core decision-making applications, patient and administrative data, and communication tools.
Previously the organization had offered dialup access via a modem or VPN. But establishing connectivity often required several help desk calls—running up administrative costs and slowing access.
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Now that our new portal is out there and people have discovered its ease of use and portability, everybody wants their applications published on it. The Sun solution has freed up a substantial amount of IT time, and we’re now adding about four applications a month.
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— Gary Horn, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Network Security, Advocate Health Care
Using Sun portal and communication products, Advocate developed a Web portal that provides remote, high-speed Internet access to a wide range of hospital applications. The portal includes a full suite of communication tools including e-mail and calendaring, and it consolidates more than 50 applications into a single user interface, greatly unifying the user experience for the hospital’s staff.
The portal keeps growing. Leveraging the flexibility of the Sun Java System Portal Server family, Advocate easily added Care Connection software to the portal. Care Connection is Advocate’s private branding of the Cerner Millennium hospital management software. The new application gives Advocate’s healthcare providers a powerful, full-featured tool for managing the entire spectrum of patient care, from admitting to discharge, and includes electronic medical records for consolidating and coordinating all aspects of a patient’s treatment.
It once took an average of about two weeks to deploy a new application at Advocate, the staff reports. Care Connection was added in less than three days—thanks to the standard interfaces and uniform coding processes of Sun Java System Portal Server.
The scalability of the Sun Java System Messaging Server enabled Advocate to easily grow its email service from 5,300 users in 1999 to over 17,000 users in 2005—without adding servers or compromising e-mail performance.
Security is critical at Advocate, and the latest HIPAA audit gave the organization a high rating in physical security, citing the Sun Java System Messaging Server’s Web-based e-mail and calendar services as a key factor.
To offer access to its community of more than 9,000 remote users, Advocate relies on Sun Java System Portal Server Secure Remote Access, an open-standards solution that provides authorized access to resources behind the corporate firewall from any Java technology-enabled browser. The solution is integrated into Sun Java System Portal Server and is not a “black box” bolt-on, so it is simple to deploy and manage.
Advocate once relied on a mix of e-mail packages. Now it has standardized on Sun Java System Messaging Server, gaining higher reliability and a single point of maintenance. As a result, Advocate has been able to reduce e-mail support from a staff of seven to just two.
Overall, Advocate Health Care reports that its Sun solutions have improved internal communications and boosted productivity. Its Sun solution is also helping Advocate consolidate and reduce the total cost of ownership of its IT infrastructure.
