IBM SOA at Initiate Systems in Healthcare Industry

SOA in Healthcare Industry - Initiate Systems - IBM SOA Customer

Initiate Systems and IBM help hospitals improve patient and provider satisfaction
Initiate Systems provides software for creating complete, real-time views of data about people and organizations.

"As an IBM Business Partner and member of the IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks, we expect that our enhanced visibility and our priority access to IBM capabilities will expand our solutions to many more clinical information systems environments." - Scott Harper, senior vice president of Initiate Systems and general manager of the healthcare division

IBM SOA Customer
Customer: Sutter Health
Deployment Country: United States
IBM Business Partner: Initiate Systems, Inc.
Industry: Healthcare

SOA Solution: Business-to-Consumer, Business Continuity, Business Integration, Business Process Management, Business Resiliency, Customer Relationship Management, Enabling Business Flexibility, Human Resources, Information Integration, Information On Demand

Overview
IBM and Business Partner Initiate Systems, Inc., provide software for creating complete, real-time views of data about people, households and organizations.

Business need: Sutter Health, a not for profit network of doctors and hospitals serving more than 100 communities in Northern California, needed a scalable patient information network that could handle millions of records in seconds.

Solution: Sutter Health turned to a system from IBM and Initiate Systems, called Initiate Identity Hub software that included IBM middleware and hardware.

Results: Improved patient and provider satisfaction

Benefits: o Improved patient and provider satisfaction o Increased clinical performance o Minimized legal and risk management issues

Case Study
IBM Business Partner Solution Brief
Industry: Healthcare and life sciences
Initiate Systems, Inc., and IBM help hospitals improve patient and provider satisfaction
IBM Business Partner: Initiate Systems
Initiate Systems, Inc., provides software for creating complete, real-time views of data about people, households and organizations. It is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

In the modern healthcare setting, “knowing your patient” is critical to quality care, but obtaining a complete picture across disparate systems and geographies is complex. How much health information can a doctor know about John Doe, from Atlanta, who’s now unconscious in an emergency room in San Jose?

The answer is a lot, thanks to a type of application known generally as a master patient index (MPI). MPIs can locate and link data from multiple, disparate systems – also known as interoperability – and provide a base from which a consolidated patient health record is built and delivered to wherever it is needed.

Successful implementations of such applications require healthcare providers to address new concerns, such as:

• How well will the MPI implementation fit with existing information technology investments?
• Are patient records across disparate systems accurately matched?
• Can complete information be viewed in a single system?
• Can the system scale to meet the needs of our large organization?
• What about the security and the speed of arrival of patient information at the point of care?

Interoperable performance in patient-centered environments

Answering those questions are IBM and Initiate Systems, an IBM Business Partner, that supplies a software component that takes MPI to a higher level — to where it functions as the cornerstone in patient-centric networks.

Initiate Systems is a leader in the development of enterprise master person index (EMPI) applications. Unlike the typical MPI, which tends to be limited in the range of databases from which it can draw, EMPI applications are designed for fast, accurate patient identification lookups on an inter-enterprise, cross-enterprise and even a global scale.

The company’s core EMPI product — Initiate Identity Hub™ software — is accurate, scalable, rapidly implemented and widely deployed. With patented matching and linking technologies, it can handle hundreds of millions of records with sub-second response times, reconciling disparate identity information -- whether duplicative, fragmented or incomplete -- and quickly delivering a complete record of the patient’s ID across disparate systems.

One customer that took advantage of the expertise from Initiate Systems is Sutter Health, a not-for-profit network of doctors and hospitals serving more than 100 communities in Northern California and headquartered in Sacramento. Given its organizational size and diversity, coupled with a growing customer base of about 10 million individuals and multiple IT application platforms, Sutter leadership recognized the need for a sophisticated EMPI.

It used Initiate Identity Hub software to build an enterprise-wide information infrastructure to tie together business platforms and legacy systems. It was able to improve patient and provider satisfaction while increasing clinical performance. For Sutter, some of the legal and risk management issues that permeate the healthcare landscape also have been minimized thanks to the quick availability of accurate and secure patient information.

Why IBM and Initiate Systems?

IBM integrates Initiate Identity Hub™ software into a healthcare organization by bringing its healthcare infrastructure expertise and leadership in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for healthcare environments. IBM middleware offerings facilitate data flows within healthcare environments, and the IBM clinical services and clinical data integration expertise is world class. IBM also offers project management including process re-engineering and optimization skills using IBM Prolink 4 methodology, which helps to improve both business and clinical processes.

SOA provides a structure, business- centric IT approach to help integrate your customers’ processes as linked, repeatable business tasks or services.

Headquartered in Chicago, Initiate Systems has been successful since entering the market in 1995 armed with patents for its records matching-and-linking technologies. The company tailors its products and services for a range of industries, with healthcare predominating. By mid-2006, about 50 of the leading hospitals in North America were using Initiate Identity Hub software.

“As an IBM Business Partner and member of the IBM PartnerWorld® Industry Networks, we expect that our enhanced visibility and our priority access to IBM capabilities will expand our solutions to many more clinical information systems environments,” said Scott Harper, senior vice president of Initiate Systems and general manager of the healthcare division.

IBM components of a solution anchored by Initiate Identity Hub software may include:

• IBM System p™ servers, offering the leadership performance of POWER5™ and POWER5+™ technology, and supported by more than 3,700 Independent Software Vendors around the world
• IBM System x™ servers, delivering industry-leading, single-system reliability and support for mixed operating system workloads
• IBM AIX® and IBM-supported Linux™ operating systems
• IBM Informix and IBM DB2® Universal Database®
• IBM middleware such as DB2 Connect
• IBM Global Financing, which provides financing to conserve cash during software implementation and integration projects.

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware: System x
Software: DB2 Universal Database, Informix Tools, DB2 Connect
Operating System: AIX, AIX 5L, Linux