|
|
SUN'S
GROWING HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY PARTNER AND CUSTOMER PORTFOLIO UNDERSCORES THE
STRENGTH OF ITS STRATEGY IN THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
Sun's Open and Reliable Platform Combined
with Its Strong ISV and Technology Partner Relationships Add Up to Several
Major Healthcare Customer Wins
Sun's Full Suite of End-to-End Solutions Help Transform Data into Knowledge
at the Point of Care in Order to Improve Patient Care
ATLANTA, GA -- January 29, 2002 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc.
continues to prevail with new technology partner and customer wins stacking
up as an increasing number of healthcare organizations - from health plans to
medical centers tohealthcare professional organizations - choose Sun to power
their network infrastructure. Offering such benefits as increased
performance, scalability and security, Sun has overshadowed the competition
and, with its technology partners, recently won a number of new customers,
including several medical centers that vary in the number of sites and types
of facilities. Sun's new customers include Health Alliance Plan, the American
Hospital Association, Major Hospital,
Riverside Regional Medical Center and Peach Regional Medical Center.
Sun has developed and implemented the latest in technology innovations in
order to further its goal of connecting and network-enabling the healthcare
industry. This is helping healthcare professionals reduce medical errors,
contain healthcare costs and provide high-quality healthcare.
"These technology partner and customer wins together with our wealth
of experience, proven technology and full suite of products demonstrate our leadership
in delivering solutions that can meet the healthcare industry's demanding
requirements for security, reliability and high-volume transactions,"
said Murtz Kizilbash, manager of healthcare and insurance markets, Global
Sales Operations, for Sun. "Sun is not only helping healthcare companies
solve the business challenges they face today, but alsohelping them adapt to
change and tackle the healthcare IT challenges of thefuture."
Health Alliance Plan Selects Sun to Drive Transactional Efficiencies
Health Alliance Plan (HAP), one of Michigan's premier health plans,
currently serves more than 3,000 employer groups and more than 537,000
members, but plans to grow its membership by 100,000 and anticipates managing
more than 900,000 members by the end of the year. To help accommodate this
growth, HAP turned to Sun to expand and enhance its claims processing
solution. In replacing its legacy system, HAP selected Perot Systems'
DIAMOND[R] 950 system software to automate and streamline the operations of
its claims processing system. HAP's criteria was a UNIX[R] platform that
could deliver an enterprise-class server capable of delivering an open
systems environment at the level of operational discipline and management
that it had previously with the mainframe system. HAP selected the Sun Enterprise 10000 server
because it will allow HAP to bring its systems environment to the level of
operational discipline it wants and provide a robust, scalable server. The
Sun server also will grow with HAP and allow the health plan the opportunity
to consolidate some of its other servers. Recently, HAP added an additional
Sun Enterprise 10000 server to its claims processing system. The Sun
Enterprise server is at the heart of HAP's business - running the DIAMOND
applications for its membership billing and claims processing. HAP is also
using Java technology for its Web-based applications and is in the process of
migrating from NetDynamics to the iPlanet
Application Server. With the new Sun solution in place, HAP has been able
to consolidate 27 servers to 14 servers, therefore helping to reduce
administrative costs. With Sun's open environment, HAP also is able to easily
interface with other applications.
AHA Chooses Sun for Web Services on Demand
The American Hospital Association (AHA) will implement Sun's technology as
the platform for a new portal for use by its members and others in the healthcare
field. Built on the Sun Open Network
Environment (Sun ONE) platform - Sun's vision, architecture, platform and
expertise for developing and deploying services on demand today - the
interactive Web site will provide information and resources to the AHA's
5,000 member hospitals and will be accessible to the entire healthcare field.
The portal will serve as a site that healthcare professionals can access to
obtain critical data such as regulatory information (i.e., HIPAA), best
practices, research, educational materials and leadership tools. Users also
will be able to interact via chat rooms and will have access to technology
applications for operational efficiencies and to available products and
services through e-commerce applications. The AHA portal will leverage the
broad spectrum of Sun's computing platform, including iPlanet Portal Server,
iPlanet Application Server, iPlanet Directory Server, iPlanet Web Server,
iPlanet Messaging Server, Sun
Enterprise servers and Sun StorEdge
systems running the Solaris 8
Operating Environment.
According to Kizilbash, "Sun is best able to help the AHA and others
in healthcare make the transition to the Internet because our wealth of
experience and proven technology suits the industry's demanding requirements
for security, reliability and high-volume transactions. Our standards-based,
open Sun ONE architecture enables our healthcare customers to build open
platforms that provide flexibility and investment protection for the future
while also allowing them to interface with important legacy
applications."
Medical Centers Pick Sun to Help Improve Patient Care Through Tools and
Knowledge at the Point of Care Major
Hospital, the most technologically advanced medical institution in the
Midwest, located in Shelbyville, Indiana, boasts a completely electronic
medical record with the recent addition of eHealthEngines PACS.
Providing a full range of both inpatient and outpatient diagnostic imaging
services to its community, including MRI, CT, ultrasound, fluoroscopy and
X-ray services, the hospital required a scalable, fully integrated digital
radiology solution that could grow to a full PACS over an 18-month period.
To that end, eHealthEngines
deployed PACS on the Sun
platform. Five imaging modalities, both DICOM and NON-DICOM compliant, are
now linked to the eHealthEngines archive for digital storage, with plans to
add Computed Radiography in the near future. As part of their day-to-day
workflow, physicians can now access images alongside reports directly from
their HIS, eliminating the need to access multiple systems for patient
information.
According to Steve Aichinger, PACS Project Lead at Major Hospital,
"Because eHealthEngines was able to tightly integrate DICOM Worklists
and the HIS, we have seen an immediate improvement in workflow efficiencies
throughout the entire department." Additionally, with a 24-hour
diagnostic imaging department, radiologists can read emergency radiology
cases from their homes - crucial in emergency situations - using
eHealthEngines' OpenMed
Viewer Web-based application. Major Hospital is also storing and
archiving all images permanently, all on Sun hardware.
"In order to complete our electronic medical record, we needed to
implement PACS. After reviewing multiple vendors, we selected eHealthEngines on the Sun platform for
its value, innovative design and flexibility," added Aichinger.
"We chose to work with Sun because of the reliability, portability
and scalability of its products," said Albert T. Kelley, CEO of
eHealthEngines. "With Sun's system, users have immediate access to
information regardless of location. We evaluated other vendors, but by
comparison and benchmark results, we found Sun to be superior in almost all
respects."
Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News, Va., a health network
of four hospitals, found a way to improve patient outcomes and its bottom
line after deploying a new point-of-care medical record system, called
Frontiers, in the operating room and recovery rooms at its flagship hospital.
The new system, developed by Virginia-based eko systems, inc., utilizes Jini technology from Sun both on a device
level and on an application level. By utilizing Jini in it's JEM, eko has
created a universal hardware component that dynamically configures itself
with the physiological monitor to which it is currently connected. Jini
technology is a core piece of the application. By incorporating Jini
technology in Frontiers, the information collected through the JEM and
entered by the clinician is sent to a mid-tier server and is ultimately
warehoused in a database server reliably and in a fault-tolerant manner.
The hospital and the patients it treats are already seeing several
benefits, including more accurate patient billings and lower administrative
costs. Hospital staff can immediately access patient data, allowing them to
review and analyze a large amount of patient data to determine which
treatment plans have the best outcomes. With this information, the hospital
can set hospital-wide treatment protocols, resulting in higher quality care.
Riverside Regional Medical Center has signed on to an enterprise-wide project
and expects to expand Frontiers to its three other hospitals.
"eko systems chose Sun's stable, high-performance computing platform
because our solution requires 24/7 uptime," said Jim Edmiston, founder,
chief technology officer and director of eko systems. "Also, Sun's
platform is reliable and fail-safe - characteristics that are critically
necessary for the mission-critical and life-critical technologies that are
used in the hospital. We have found it easy to use, easy to maintain and
extremely scalable."
Peach Regional Medical Center, a full-service hospital in Fort Valley,
Georgia, was in desperate need of upgrading its existing outdated
administration system and wanted a system that would be easy to use and serve
the hospital's daily administrative tasks: registration, patient and hospital
accounting, billing, medical records and materials management. The hospital
turned to Creative Healthcare Systems (CHS) and Sun for a fully functional,
cost-effective health information network. CHS's MedGenix Health Information Network
is a multi-tier e-health solution running on Sun's Solaris Operating
Environment. MedGenix encompasses a variety of health information
applications, from a master patient index and medical records to general
ledger, payroll and patient accounting. By using Internet technology, the Sun
and CHS solution enables Peach Regional Medical Center to store and share
information from all healthcare providers in a central database. Users can
easily gain access, 24 hours a day, to information such as immunization
history, long-term care, home health services, current medications and
billing information - all via scalable architecture. Solaris is a top
operating environment for network servers and is a key component of the Sun
Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) - the vision, architecture, platform and
expertise for developing Services on Demand today.
"Sun's technology is cost-efficient and secure, and it makes our job
much easier due to the stability of the Solaris Operating Environment,"
said Steve Everest, president and CEO of CHS. "With MedGenix running on
the Solaris Operating Environment, Peach Regional Medical Center can take
advantage of a reliable, highly available and secure environment for its
healthcare needs."
To reduce maintenance costs and redundancies at the desktop, Peach
Regional Medical Center also selected Sun's
Sun Ray information appliance. The Sun Ray appliance with its Hot Desk
technology enables Peach Regional Medical Center staff to access critical patient
information and move from room to room or between work spaces without logging
out of patients' medical records. As a result, Peach Regional Medical Center
can devote more time to patient care and less time to maintaining a PC-based
desktop, meeting the demand for increased individualized care without the
need for additional staff. The smart card capabilities in the Sun Ray
appliance, combined with the smart card services in the Solaris 8 Operating
Environment, provide the administration at Peach Regional Medical Center with
a highly secure, yet portable, environment that helps increase productivity
and reduce risk.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- The Network Is The
Computer -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its
position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and
services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their
businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the
World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com/.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Ray, Solaris, Sun Enterprise,
Sun StorEdge, Java, Jini, iPlanet and The Network Is The Computer are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United
States and other countries. Unix is a registered trademark in the United
States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company Ltd.
PR Contacts for Press and Analysts:
|