Trillium In The News

The National Post

Filing patients records requires less patience
Storage area network: Hospital adopts system used by banks

April 8, 2003

As health care organizations move closer to the day when patient files are completely electronic, their data storage requirements are growing.

Organizations such as Trillium Health Centre are upgrading their computer storage systems to handle electronic files safely, quickly and accurately. The upgrade delivers patients’ test results sooner and costs less to operate than the older system.

Trillium Health Centre was created in 1998, when Ontario’s health services restructuring commission directed the former Mississauga Hospital and Queensway General Hospital, in Etobicoke, to amalgamate.

Like many organizations inside and outside the health care sector, the hospitals each had several computer systems purchased to address different issues as they arose. When the two organizations merged, they had a jumble of systems and a variety of platforms.

For example, the admissions system ran on one network while the radiology module ran on another. “In our old system, we had 25 different modules that had a processing speed of about 60 megahertz or so,” says Mike Mendonca, manager for applications and service operations information technology at Trillium. “They were all connected and they talked to each other, but that that talking caused a lot of traffic.”

The traffic made the systems operate very slowly. But the real trigger for the centre to buy a new storage system was- - as it is for many health care groups across the country- - the implementation of a picture archiving system (PACS) a year ago.

The PACS digitizes the images generated from radiological procedures, such as X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized axial tomography CAT) scans. The system reduces the time required to produce test results by eliminating the need to process the film, but the highly detailed digital image files it creates are quite large.

“We realized this information would require a significant amount of storage space,” says Lori Driscoll, Trillium’s director of information technology. “In order to address that storage need, which would increase on an ongoing basis, we decided to purchase a storage area network.”

Trillium purchased a SAN last fall from Toronto-based EMC Canada, which has installed systems in hospitals across Canada. Geoff Haydon, managing director of EMC Canada, says the San will help Trillium increase the amount of data in can manage. “ What they had to do [before the SAN] was a variety of disparate, independent islands of information. And the difficulty with that is it becomes very expensive from a management and maintenance perspective because you need staff with a variety of skill sets for the various platforms,” Mr. Haydon says.

The SAN consolidates all of Trillium’s previously independent systems on one common platform and storage network.

Mr. Mendonca says he began seeing results almost immediately. He estimates the system’s processing speed is 80 to 100 times faster, because the 13 servers in the network are connected by a fibre link that transfers information almost instantaneously.

The increase in processing speed has been noticed by end-users, too. “ Our director of finance phoned me and said, ‘ I don’t know what the SAN thing is, but I really like it because our month-end report that used to take three or four days to compile was finished within an hour,” Mr. Mendonca says.

It also used to take the system two to three hours to compile the necessary payroll information, but now it happens in minutes. “ Our payroll person walked away to make a photocopy and when she came back, it was done.”

One of the biggest benefits of using SAN is its reliability. The system is designed to be redundant, with dual drives and processors (one active and one passive) in each server. If one fails, the other will spring into action so quickly that users on the system will not notice a difference.

“That kind of performance becomes more and more critical as we migrate patient information to electronic modality,” Ms. Driscoll says.

“If you have information in an electronic format, you have to ensure that it’s always going to be available.”

Mr. Haydon says Trillium’s SAN has software that backs up its electronic files to a remote site in real time. If there is a gas leak or a flood at the building where the centre’s critical PACS application is running, for instance, the application can be restarted within minutes from the remote site with all of the current file data.

“It’s a technology that’s been available for some time and is deployed with chartered banks,” Mr. Haydon says. “But only now, with digitization of records, is it becoming a relevant technology to the medical community.”  

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