Podcast transcript: Baptist Health Systems case study

Jimmy Touchstone:
There’s a lot of things going on here at Baptist. We’re just growing every day. It’s a dynamic environment here when you’re dealing with healthcare that’s moving as fast as it does.

Moderator:
Here’s Kramer Stovall of VSS:

Kramer Stovall:
What ends up happening over the years in healthcare is they end up with a lot of different brands of equipment and none of it really communicates well together. Baptist Health Systems in particular had a lot of dissimilar….process made it very difficult to scale the hospital with the data demands they have today.

Jimmy Touchstone:
This was a complete overhaul of what we were doing, of our entire infrastructure.  We did a lot of detailed study and a lot of investigation and we talked to a lot of people.  We evaluated a Hewlett-Packard. We evaluated Sun. We evaluated, EMC-Dell and we evaluated IBM.  It was the support that IBM gave us that actually – and the price breaking that they did – those two things right there actually put IBM well over the top. And the work that VSS did to get us that, along with IBM, was exceptional.

Kramer Stovall:
Phase 1 is to put an IBM DS8300 in which is the most robust, scalable IBM storage array ever made. And at the same time with Phase 1, we put in the IBM N series for the PACS archival. Then we have another layer of archival in the IBM TS3500 tape library.

Jimmy Touchstone:
Archiving has produced a tremendous amount of data here at the hospital.  I don’t think a lot of these people really realized how much data they actually had accumulated over the years. It is massive. And it’s getting bigger every day.

Kramer Stovall:
So we came in and said, “All right. Let’s really classify this data and let’s see.” And then based on some studies we did, some data is three years, other data is seven years. So why keep it on the same class of media? That’s where we were able to introduce tape and do a fire line archival. So some date after three years, spins off the N series on to the tape; some after seven. From there, we keep a copy in the tape library and it can also do a copy over to what’s called a WORM tape to take offsite. And when they take it offsite, it’s both on compliant WORM media and it is encrypted. And a copy is left on-site.

Jimmy Touchstone:
We’ve been able to hold these studies online for approximately six months at one location and then move them to another location. This gives them a chance to do follow ups without having to do a lot of long archive retrieval process. We didn’t have that ability to begin with. So we’ve given ourselves a thousand percent more functionality. We’ve given ourselves plenty of room to grow.

We deal with the customers who are our patients and we are in the lifesaving business. So we look at it like that. And we feel that we have to get the information to the caregivers at the speed of “right now,” because the decisions that they have to make may save that person’s life, and that’s what we’re, we’re trying to do.  And IBM has certainly helped us in accomplishing that mission.

Moderator:
Thanks for sharing your story with us! To learn more about these and other healthcare and life sciences solutions from IBM, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/healthcare. For more information about VSS, visit www.vss-inc.com. For more information about Baptist Health Systems, visit www.mbhs.org.