Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre Ensures Security of Hospital Records with High-Availability, Clustered Database Solution
 
 

Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre Ensures Security of Hospital Records with High-Availability, Clustered Database Solution

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Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre, founded in 1970, integrates the Education Ministry’s network of university hospitals, and it is academically linked to the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Considered one of the largest and most important hospitals in Brazil, it offers services covering more than 60 areas of specialization, has over 800 beds, and admits nearly 2,500 patients per day.

The Hospital needed to ensure high availability for critical business applications to streamline operations, and better serve the patients in its care. As important, it looked to replicate the IT environment to support continuity of operations and the availability of information during contingency situations.

The project included the upgrade of the Oracle Database, Standard Edition and the incorporation of Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Active Data Guard to increase IT environment stability, patient information security, and improve the availability of its network. It also reduced the number of hours hospital IT staff dedicate to database maintenance, freeing up professionals to perform other tasks, thereby improving productivity.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre

  • “With the update of the IT infrastructure built on Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters, we now manage more than one million active patient records without network availability problems. This is critical to delivering quality patient care.” – Valter Ferreira da Silva, Infrastructure and IT Manager, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre

  • Increase availability of the hospital’s IT infrastructure, replacing the old platform with a robust foundation capable of meeting the demands of more than 7,000 daily system users across the hospital
  • Replicate the new IT environment to ensure high-level availability and database performance, increasing stability and security, as well as ensuring access to critical patient information, in case of network failure or contingency situations
  • Perform IT infrastructure maintenance without interrupting availability of business-critical applications, guaranteeing continuity of access to more than 1 million patient records

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Upgraded to Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition and deployed Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Active Data Guard, ensuring high availability for database and applications, allowing staff to rapidly and reliably access more than 1 million active medical records, used for documentation and decision-making during patient examinations as well as outpatient and surgical procedures
  • Implemented Oracle Real Application Clusters and gained the ability to run the database on two simultaneous servers—ensuring system continuity and stability—should the availability of one server be temporarily interrupted
  • Created a complete contingency IT infrastructure with Oracle Active Data Guard through which all instances of the main database site are duplicated on a remote site, which can be activated in case the primary environment becomes unavailable
  • Gained the ability to update and maintain applications (such as patient records, exams and surgical scheduling) without interrupting the system, ensuring continuous service for network users
  • Reduced the number of hours hospital IT staff dedicate to database maintenance, freeing up IT professionals to perform other tasks, thereby improving productivity

Why Oracle

“We needed more availability and an infrastructure that ensured continuity for our system and access for our users, even in the face of a problem or need for temporary maintenance. Oracle’s tools helped us achieve these goals, and today we can serve our patients reliability and safely, as we have a stable and robust environment, as well as a total contingency system,” said Valter Ferreira da Silva, infrastructure and IT manager, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre.

Partner

“We have a long history of working with Oracle, and our decision to continue with the company demonstrates how satisfied we are with this relationship. For this Oracle database upgrade project, we worked in partnership with Ação Informática and Advanced IT, which gave us peace of mind because it demonstrated extensive knowledge of the solution and of our business,” Silva said.

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