Success Stories

Kaiser Permanente

Company Brief

Kaiser Permanente is America's leading integrated health care organization. Founded in 1945, it is a nonprofit, group-practice health maintenance organization (HMO) with headquarters in Oakland, California. Kaiser Permanente serves the health care needs of members in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Today, it encompasses Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc., Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, and the Permanente Medical Groups, as well as affiliation with Group Health Cooperative based in Seattle, Washington. Kaiser Permanente aspires to be the world leader in improving health through high-quality, affordable, integrated health care.

Business Challenge

Kaiser Permanente's strategic clinical information Web site, Permanente Knowledge Connection (PKC), is an Internet- and intranet-based application that enables Kaiser Permanente clinicians and soon Kaiser Permanente affiliates nationwide to access up-to-date and personalized healthcare and clinical information. Access to this information and additional collaboration tools help Kaiser Permanente professionals share and develop healthcare practices and guidelines.

In designing the PKC system, National Web Services sought a solution that would be easy to implement and quickly accessible, and enable rapid integration of future online databases.

Built On BEA Solution

National Web Services selected BEA WebLogic Server because it supports industry Java standards, including Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). In addition, the clustering capability of BEA WebLogic Server meets Kaiser Permanente's requirements for scalability and availability. Clustering allows multiple computers to run the application and ensures that PKC can support hundreds of thousands of users who need around-the-clock access with transparent recovery from errors and no performance degradation.

PKC is a dynamic, online tool facilitated by Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute that allows the company's clinicians and affiliates to quickly and easily share medical knowledge, as well as participate in discussion groups with other colleagues. The new Java-based system helps enable clinicians nationwide to make better healthcare decisions, and ultimately deliver cost savings to the organization.

Users can log on to the password-protected PKC site using a standard Web browser through its corporate intranet or the Internet to retrieve the latest healthcare treatments and medical data. The previous system could not scale to handle the increased demand for PKC, which now supports more than 150,000 users within the U.S. The new system is scheduled to handle hundreds of thousands of new users. National Web Services completed development of the BEA WebLogic Server-based system in less than five months.

The PKC application is built on a three-tier architecture, and deployed on Sun Microsystems Enterprise 3000 servers. The Web server tier runs Netscape Enterprise Server, BEA WebLogic servlets, and is load-balanced by IBM's Network Dispatcher. The application server tier makes use of clustered EJB component application logic modules running on BEA WebLogic Server. The database tier takes advantage of an Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) configuration, allowing multiple instances to access the same physical database at the same time.

"The BEA WebLogic Server provided the development team a solid foundation for the PKC application," said David Tuttle, Web development manager for National Web Services at Kaiser Permanente. "We were able to focus on the needs of the business rather than core application infrastructure such as connection pooling, EJB clustering, and so on. Leveraging BEA's expertise in those areas saved development time and money."