Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches Featuring VMware, eClinicalWorks, Concordant, Third Brigade and BIDMC

By Messaging News staff
in

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) 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.

The solution was designed by BIDMC and Concordant, a leading provider of consulting and managed services for the healthcare industry. Concordant fully deployed the solution and also provides ongoing help desk and system management services for BIDPO. In addition, BIDPO engaged with VMware partner Third Brigade (now part of Trend Micro) to help secure the end-to-end solution. Third Brigade provides server and application protection to safeguard the virtual machines containing the sensitive personal, medical and financial data that physician practices enter into the eClinicalWorks system.

“We have been able to leverage great relationships and powerful solutions from three companies to effectively deploy our service to physician practices via the cloud – without requiring physicians to deploy any hardware in their practices or having to provide physicians with constant on-site technical support,” says Bill Gillis, manager clinical application services, BIDMC. “We knew the VMware platform would be ideal for the deployment because of the efficiency, control, and choice that it provides.” 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 US$300,000 to make the necessary adjustments in a traditional hardware-based environment. In the virtualized cloud environment, the cost was US$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.

In addition to that substantial capital savings, virtualization is generating ongoing operational savings for BIDPO. Concordant has found that its virtualized solutions can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for practice management and EHR systems by 40 percent.

Published June 15, 2009