A half dozen large Boston-area hospitals, which already share IT resources, are now setting their sights on the World Wide Web.
The group is hard at work building customized Web applications for single sign-on, easy access to patient records, and Web-based paging for physicians and other medical personnel who always seem to be on the go.
The hospitals - Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Brigham & Women's Hospital, and Newton-Wellesley Hospital among them - are building dozens of these Web applications in-house with the help of Caché from InterSystems Corp. The applications, based on the Caché database management system, are replacing the hospitals' older and less flexible MGH Utility Multiprocessing System databases. Caché is a Web-enabled object-oriented relational database and development environment.
The benefits of Caché are already being realized. "One of our latest projects, a directory application built in-house, gives you a way to rapidly discover phone numbers for all the people who are moving around the different hospitals on any particular day," says Kathyln Monbouquette, director of telecommunications and operations at Partners Healthcare System, which provides IT services to the group of area hospitals.
The hospitals now have about 30,000 Web-ready desktops that authorized people can use to get at Caché-based database applications. The number of desktops is expected to climb to 50,000 by year-end. The six hospitals are connected by T-1 and T-3 lines, or OC-12 SONET rings.
Intranet stat!
Using Caché, the IT team at Partners Healthcare System set up a centralized server that contains metadata, which describes what is on the Web servers on the hospitals' intranet.
A dozen Caché database servers hold information such as directories listing thousands of personnel, schedules, online records and files, and phone and pager numbers.
Users can authenticate their identity from any Web desktop and gain access to authorized resources.
The hospitals have about 100 Caché applications running, the latest one providing a way to page medical personnel via the Web instead of by phone.
"To alert a physician about abnormal lab results, for instance, you would just go to the Web directory and click on 'page,' and it will do it for you," Monbouquette says.
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