Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center – Using an Internal Cloud for Virtualized Electronic Health Records for Private Physician Groups

One very incidental item here is the cost, when you read below you can see how virtualization does save money by using existing or less hardware the virtual servers operate on one or a few host machines. The hospital is using an internal cloud to host the medical records for the physicians on staff to use at their offices. There are other virtual applications available to day as well that can do pretty much the same as well. VMware was one of the first virtual applications to hit the market a few years ago.

The physicians now have software as a service for their medical records with the hospital being the storage silo. One other essential service deployed was security for the virtuals and they selected a vendor with full integration services. Even though it is a virtual operating system on a host machine, they still need security and anti virus software. Virtual servers can also talk to each other in essence and with fall over capabilities, so if one has a problem it simply falls over to the other virtual machine and it is business as usual. Backing up virtuals is pretty efficient as well. eClinicalWorks is the ambulatory EHR system used by the physicians at their offices. The records system at the hospital already has the capability to use both the personal health records of Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault as well. BD

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has deployed the VMware platform and transformed its Electronic Health Records (EHR) datacenter into an internal cloud that allows it to deliver a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for electronic health records to more than 200 private physician practices throughout Massachusetts.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a preeminent teaching hospital and its renowned staff treats more than 250,000 patients annually. In addition, the Beth Israel Deaconess Physician Organization (BIDPO) provides a variety of services to support hundreds of its member physician practices that are independently owned. BIDPO recently implemented a solution from eClinicalWorks that provides electronic health records and practice management capabilities to help clinically integrate its member practices.

In fact, the value of the cloud-based solution was tested early in the project. A specification was changed unexpectedly and Gillis estimates it would have cost $300,000 to make the necessary adjustments in a traditional hardware-based environment. In the virtualized cloud environment, the cost was $20,000, which represents a savings of 93 percent compared to the traditional approach. Furthermore, changing a hardware-based solution would have required weeks to implement, delaying the project significantly.