Sun Bridges the Healthcare Digital Divide

Sun and its partners have the software, storage, systems and service solutions that can help the healthcare industry deliver secure health information exchange, cost-efficient data management, compliance, and caregiver mobility solutions that reduce costs and medical errors while improving efficiency and patient care.

Building on its decades of experience working with hospitals, clinics, and insurers, Sun is leveraging its leading-edge technologies to deploy end-to-end healthcare infrastructure solutions.

The healthcare industry is composed of a vast array of information technology designed to collect, manage, communicate, and store information about patients. These systems have traditionally existed independently of one another, making it difficult for physicians to access a complete view of a patient’s care record. Rather, patients must take their medical records with them when they switched doctors - or, often, even when they saw a specialist within the same organization. The repercussions of this system not only hampers a care provider’s workflow efficiency, but increases the cost to deliver care with duplicate procedures and tests, additional staff resource requirements and time-consuming coordination of care calls. Further, the inability to see a patient’s complete care record increases the opportunity for medical errors and adverse medication dispensing methods – a topic gaining public and governmental awareness. In an industry where attracting and retaining physicians, nurses and caregivers is central to business success, these are challenges with which every organization must contend. Nevertheless, without a standardized method for sharing patient records, the healthcare industry has remained highly segmented, inefficient and costly for decades.

Today, that situation is changing. The advent of secure, high-performance IT networks capable of locating and managing large volumes of patient data stored in disparate systems, has brought a new level of connectedness to healthcare - and Sun is at the forefront of the trend. Building on decades of experience working with hospitals, clinics, and insurers, Sun offers end-to-end healthcare infrastructure solutions that can both improve patient care, increase caregiver satisfaction and retention rates all while saving healthcare organizations money.

Healthcare organizations face Compliance pressures
End-to-end IT solutions for healthcare must address a variety of challenges, from digitization of hard-copy medical images to secure, role and identity-driven exchange of electronic patient information amongst the appropriate caregiver, payer and governmental institutions. Government regulations for privacy and efficiency compliance standards, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), exert further pressure by requiring certain types of patient records to be stored for years - even, in some cases, beyond the lifetime of the patient.

urther, the possibility of regulatory audits requires institutions to become and remain vigilant in their business practices. Protecting business information and patient data ensures privacy and the ability to comply with governmental and industries regulations. It also facilitates appropriate response to legal actions and reduces system vulnerability from malicious intent. All of these business concerns lead to a need for compliance oversight, and Sun has the solutions to help. By providing a complete end-to-end, single source solution for software, systems, storage and services, Sun helps healthcare organizations manage compliance efforts. Our integrated product suites are designed to work together seamlessly, enabling compliance requirements through security, auditing and reporting tools that help reduce costs associated with the administration of healthcare services.

Healthcare Data Management Best Practices
Because healthcare organizations deal with massive volumes of data, they must manage information efficiently throughout its lifecycle or face ever-escalating IT costs. More importantly, though, effective data management plays a key role in enabling excellent patient care. The majority of people receiving healthcare are outpatients, and their records don’t automatically travel with them from caregiver to caregiver, creating coordination of care issues that are dangerous, inefficient and certainly expensive. For instance, without the ability to access electronic health records, test results or images caregivers often repeat tests, administrators have to manage storage and archiving manually and information technology staff are only able to retrospectively react to growing data requirements.

Now, StorageTek[tm] storage solutions offered by Sun can handle crushing loads of digital data such as films, electronic health records, and older files that need to be converted to digital format. With Sun you get an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy that keeps dormant files in low-cost tape libraries rather than on expensive disks. This increased efficiency reduces costs and helps drive down medical errors from human intervention by implementing a film-less digital image management solution.

Sun's ILM offerings are designed to keep data that must be accessed quickly and frequently on high-performance storage media while moving less frequently used information to slower, less expensive media. This tiered storage strategy can help speed retrieval times for immediately relevant data, such as recent medical test results. At the same time, it can help keep storage costs in check for items like prior years’ mammography images, which must be stored for the lifetime of the patient.

In addition to financial pressures, healthcare organizations face significant regulatory pressures related to data storage. Hospitals are using Sun’s Information Lifecycle Management solution to adapt to the challenging regulatory environment. Sun’s StorageTek solutions can help the hospital consolidate its departmental networks into an enterprise-wide system integrating facilities and modalities, from MRIs to cardiology. To manage the high terabytes of data in its archives, healthcare organizations can StorageTek Application Storage Manager (ASM) software, which allows IT managers to use policy-based management practices to administer and retrieve data across the three tiers of storage media.

As a result, Sun helps healthcare organizations meet compliance requirements quickly. More importantly, though, Sun translates its ILM solutions into improvements in patient care.

Creating Secure Health Information Exchange to improve patient care
Healthcare organizations generally agree that secure, standardized health information exchange is the key to having a comprehensive medical background on their patients that allows them to make the most appropriate decisions for treatment. When a patient meets with a new physician, the doctor may run an entire battery of tests to establish a baseline for the patient - a process that is time-consuming and expensive. Coordination of care between multiple providers is strictly a manual process that requires physicians to marry their busy schedules with that of their colleagues. Without the ability to see into a patient’s records, doctors and payer are also not able to determine a holistic treatment of care, medication interactions, over-prescribing or "doctor-shopping".

To combat fraud, waste and inefficiencies healthcare organizations need enterprise-wide infrastructure that is secure, cost-effective - and routine. Still, many healthcare providers have resisted revamping their systems because they were unable to forecast a reasonable return on the investment, they were unsure of the future of industry technology or they could not find a comprehensive solution that addresses the entire information lifecycle.

Today, Sun offers open, standards-based solutions built upon a service-oriented architecture that enables organizations to layer and leverage their existing systems. The ability to create an Electronic Health Record or Health Information Exchange solution that provides secure, web-enabled views of disparate information means organizations have a future-proofed answer. Better data enables healthcare organizations to connect with patients on an individual level - which further helps cut costs by steering patients to the most appropriate care providers.

Healthcare can reap these benefits through a technology and infrastructure model that interconnects the local network, regional or even national healthcare community to enhance patient safety and quality of care. Sun is adept at showing healthcare institution administrators and payer organizations how, by creating a health exchange they can provide the appropriate services to patients, improve physician satisfaction and improve operational efficiencies that open availability to increased patient flow. As a result, healthcare providers and payers around the world are establishing health information organization that will bring together patient information from disparate hospitals, physicians, clinics, pharmacies, community labs, radiology facilities, nursing homes, health plans, and public health information systems.

Enabling Caregiver Mobility with Security
Organizations looking to quickly improve care delivery can count on Sun to deliver exceptional solutions for clinical transformation. By delivering the hospitals' information systems directly to the point of care, physicians are able to quickly gain access to need to know information. Collaborating with Sun to implement advanced SunRay thin clients, software, server and hardware configurations means clinical care applications are available where the physician and patient meet, without time consuming and compliance stifling log-ons and log-offs. The ability to quickly and securely access a hospital’s clinical information systems simplifies and updates the way care is delivered, including the way medical orders, diagnoses, and treatments are processed.

Healthcare’s primary users including doctors and nurses require as much data as possible in a reasonable amount of time. Even five minutes is too long when a patient’s life is on the line. Moving quickly throughout the care facility, providers are able to launch their sessions by inserting their identity card and typing a single password. Clinicians love Sun’s ability to seamlessly deliver their most used applications, health records, the latest patient images, plus any prior studies at the point of care and with just a click of a mouse. When they remove their card, the screen is cleared and they can move to the next room, pod or ward only to insert their card, type the password and securely bring up the same session in seconds…dramatically improving access to need to know information. IT professionals love Sun’s Caregiver Mobility Solutions too. With decreased maintenance and application deployment costs, a "stateless environment", plus increased security from system threats, the SunRay thin clients and Sun’s Secure Global Desktop software make a winning combination for any institution.

Sun fosters an active healthcare community
Providing an end-to-end solution for healthcare means more than providing critical technologies - it also means fostering a virtual healthcare IT community that actively promotes the sharing of best-practices and new ideas. To this end, Sun invites you to “opt-in” to its community to gain access to information on healthcare solutions, technology, and new approaches from an industry leader. In addition, you will receive advance notification when Sun conducts healthcare webinars and conferences to help you stay informed about the latest advances in IT for the healthcare industry.

End-to-end Sun solutions promise to transform the healthcare industry
As an established innovator in IT, Sun has demonstrated its commitment to developing healthcare solutions that help improve patient care while improving the industry. Sun has pioneered solutions including award-winning operating systems like Solaris, software for service-oriented architecture (SOA), business integration and identity management, combined with the scalable, secure infrastructure systems, leading storage expertise in ILM and knowledgable services experts to deliver a repeatable blueprint for success. Sun has the flexibility to integrate data and applications, combine them with its native technologies such as Solaris and Java and deliver transformational, end-to-end business solutions.