Making A Difference: University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System
I'm back with more ways Sun is making a difference. I just heard about this great success story & had to share it.
UAB - Enabling Physicians to Provide Faster, Better Care - Read about it
About the customer
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Health System manages the healthcare needs of Alabama’s diverse population, including inpatient and outpatient services, rural clinics, a research facility ranked 16th in National Institutes of Health (NIH) Funds, and a health plan with more than 65,000 members and 5,000 physicians. UAB is one of the largest transplant centers in the world and is ranked as number two in overall kidney transplants in the United States.
Their business issues were:
- Need to deliver patient information at point of care
- Must provide secure information access while maintaining privacy
- How to aggregate information from disparate systems
About the DIFFERENCE
Using Sun products and services, UAB was able to achieve these business results.
- Provide faster access to patient records at point of care
- Increase information sharing for improved health care
- Lower maintenance and support costs
- Provide a faster return-on-investment (ROI)
- Preserve investments in legacy systems
I think the biggest way that Sun helped make a difference at UAB is best explained with this quote from Dr. Michael Waldrum, COO of UAB Health System.
"In order to make good health care decisions and take care of patients better, you have to have the right information at the point of care in order to provide the highest quality of care you can... With Java and Sun’s Java CAPS integration engine, we can deploy the Web and utilize Web tools that allow us to give information to our providers quicker and at a lower cost. We can also build incrementally without having to rebuild the underlying infrastructure and change legacy systems. Using Sun tools we’ve been able to take information in disparate systems and aggregate it at the enterprise level, so it rolls up to the patient level and its available across the enterprise for that patient. And with Sun Ray clients, we can decrease the amount of time it takes to get the information, and provide it with less maintenance cost. Having the information available improves health care because clinicians can make more informed decisions. Additionally if that information can come to them easier then it improves their efficiency, so they can do more and be more productive."
Wow, that's a mouthful but no one else can say it better. Basically patients are treated better, faster & more economically!
About the solution
UAB deployed Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, Sun Fire servers, Solaris 10 , and Sun Java technologies to aggregate patient information and deliver it across all points of care.
- UAB deployed over 600 Sun Ray clients for patient information access and plans to add more than 3,000 over two years.
- To enable integration of legacy systems, UAB uses Java CAPS and Sun SeeBeyond eGate Integrator.
- UAB uses Sun Java System Identity Manager to integrate with the Sun Java System Portal Serverand the Sun Ray clients.
Just another great Sun story brought to you by Rockin' Robin!
