CTO with heart

RICK COPPLE'S WORK represents the merger of two trends: specialty medicine and the promise of the paperless office.

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The CTO has been working toward the opening of The Indiana Heart Hospital (TIHH), an all-digital hospital within the Indianapolis-based Community Health Network. The delivery of this paperless, filmless, wireless specialty hospital has brought a myriad of issues and opportunities.

Since an agreement was penned to develop TIHH, all-digital was the only consideration for patient records, something that Copple appreciates -- and something that only a few other healthcare CTOs currently enjoy. Just 12 percent of clinicians use handheld devices to access patient data, according to a survey of 453 doctors, released this month by the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

Combating cultural issues within health care slows technology adoption by many clinicians. "The culture is different here," Copple says of TIHH. "Right off the bat, [medical staff] will be using the technology. Often culture is the biggest barrier to technology adoption [in hospitals]."

When the $60 million hospital publicly opens its doors on Feb. 17, 2003, doctors will access patients' medical records via computers installed either inside the 88 private rooms, or via their own wireless life book or notebook using 802.11a.

In fact, TIHH has been working with GE Medical Systems to develop the clinicians' dashboards, providing data on patients under their care and access to other important information at bedside or in wireless notebooks. Digital delivery of X-rays won't be of diagnostic quality, Copple says. "But the doctors can look at something -- start to finish in 30 seconds." Film results are also available.

Down the road, although Copple is sure that an all-digital hospital will require rethinking standard storage needs, he's not sure exactly how much space will be needed once TIHH is operating near capacity. In all, at TIHH's Community Health Network, IT currently supports 8,500 employees handling 37,000 inpatient and 535,000 outpatient admissions yearly.

Rather than wait for an emergency to force his hand, the CTO chose to improve storage and network response across the five-hospital environment prior to TIHH's opening. The CTO opted to build a redundant datacenter at Indiana Heart Hospital, about 11 miles from the main datacenter. But to leverage the existing storage, Copple turned to storage virtualization, using SANsymphony, a software solution from DataCore.

The scalable software makes it possible to remotely replicate storage between datacenters. "This type of appliance allows you to virtualize across heterogeneous environments and to scale higher and higher, although there are practical limits," says Dianne McAdam, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based research company Illuminata.

Adding the software has already improved network response time for the other networked facilities, Copple says.

"Database processes that took 30 minutes now take just ten, backups received a similar boost, and one application that previously took 25 minutes to complete 2,200 transactions now takes only seven minutes," he says. "The improvement in performance is so dramatic that our doctors noticed it immediately. On top of it all, the software leverages the IT staff's existing skill sets and automates common tasks, eliminating the need for additional, dedicated staff to manage the storage network," Copple says.