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Singapore Healthcare staff is used to treating patients and making them well again, but when it came to its legacy IT infrastructure it was in need of a remedy.
Among the challenges it was facing, the most pressing ones included delays in information sharing such as critical patient records, variable clinical quality and overall administrative complexity.
That’s where the Health Cloud (H-Cloud) solution developed by Integrated Health Information Systems (IHIS) in collaboration with Schneider Electric for the critical physical infrastructure, provided the perfect antidote to what ailed Singapore Healthcare.
To standardize, consolidate and guarantee maximum uptime for its IT critical physical infrastructure systems, IHIS worked with Schneider Electric to build two data centres to host the H-Cloud that uses state-of-the-art technology to support, or replace, legacy hardware and software used within each of Singapore’s six regional health systems.
More than 40,000 healthcare workers in six medical service clusters now use IHIS’s H-Cloud to access and consolidate all patient electronic medical records (EMRs). The result is faster and more accurate diagnoses, higher data uptime, as well as major savings in hardware, man-hours, and energy.
An independent assessment by PwC suggests that the H-Cloud will deliver savings of hundreds of millions of dollars over the next ten years. Each hospital cluster will, on average, reduce its costs by about 55 percent compared to business-as-usual costs by 2025.
The H-Cloud provides a single platform for clinicians to access, analyze and update patient EMRs across two data centers while also guaranteeing disaster recovery and uptime at these two data centers. In particular, the use of an active-active configuration across two data centers provides clinicians with the 24-7 uptime they need, within a cost-effective and well-utilized pool of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resource.
The end result brings state-of-the-art technology to support the nation’s healthcare operations with greater assurance and enhanced security, resiliency, stability, continuity and accessibility.
In addition to IHIS’s H-Cloud, a DCIM solution from Schneider Electric was also deployed to enable IHIS’s health cloud to achieve energy efficiencies and efficient budgeting when performing charge back of power consumption and cost to their users.
IHIS was recently awarded the “Cloud End User Innovation 2015 Award” by BroadGroup at the Data Center and Cloud Awards at Datacloud Congress in Monaco.
On winning the award, IHIS CEO Dr Chong Yoke Sin said: “We built H-Cloud with the aim for delivering an agile yet cost-effective cloud environment that would keep our infrastructure secure and robust, as well as enable our healthcare institutions to deploy application systems in a faster, cheaper, and greener way as compared to traditional methods.
“More importantly, the success of Health Cloud ultimately benefits the Singapore population, as it enhances the patient experience and patient safety in the longer term.”
Now that’s a picture of health we can all aspire to.
