Strata Health Solutions Supports Real-Time Resource Matching and Expands e-Referral System with a Highly Available Database Environment
 
 

Strata Health Solutions Supports Real-Time Resource Matching and Expands e-Referral System with a Highly Available Database Environment

  • Oracle Customer:  Strata Health Solutions Inc.
    Location:  Alberta, Canada
    Industry:  Healthcare
    Employees:  45

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Strata Health Solutions Inc. is a software as a service (SaaS) provider that leverages technology to achieve dramatic patient-flow improvements within health systems. Strata’s clients have entrusted them with the job of creating patient-flow solutions that achieve real and dramatic benefits for patients, their families, and the world’s devoted frontline caregivers. With operations in Canada and the United Kingdom, Strata Health is a privately-held, Canadian corporation.

Strata PathWays is an online, real-time, resource-matching and intelligent e-Referral system that improves access to care and the patient experience. Connected to care providers in the community, Pathways provides frontline clinicians with real-time tools to quickly discharge patients to appropriate and available beds and program openings. The e-Referral system radically reduces the time that patients occupy acute-care beds after they have been assessed for discharge into alternative community programs, such as facilities for mental health and addictions, rehabilitation/sub-acute care, homecare, continuing care centers, assisted living, palliative care, physiotherapy, community support, and adult daycare programs.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Strata Health Solutions Inc.

  • “Oracle Database Appliance provided us with the scalability and flexibility that we needed to support our PathWays system. Now, we can continue to grow organically, without increasing our database support, which is a huge advantage for us.” – Darren Jones, Chief Operating Officer, Strata Health Solutions Inc.

  • Ensure a highly available data infrastructure to accommodate increasing support and hosting requirements, as a growing number of hospitals and service providers within the local health integration networks (LHIN’s) adopt the company’s Strata PathWays patient flow system
  • Migrate one customer that was self-hosting PathWays on hardware designed for a single LHIN to Strata Health’s SaaS-based managed hosting program (MHP)

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed Oracle Database Appliance to create a high performance database cluster infrastructure for the company’s PathWays system, enabling Strata Health to robustly handle the growing volume of LHINs—while also allowing seamless referrals within a cluster of LHINs—leading to better, more cost-effective patient care
  • Used Oracle Database Appliance to move one customer to the company’s MHP to eliminate the customer’s need to scale current staffing or production servers, thereby freeing technical resources to work on other production applications, running in the shared environment
  • Benefited, during the client’s migration, by enabling the Strata Health support team to interact directly with end users, ultimately reducing the support steps required to resolve issues for all parties—most notably clinical users
  • Developed a proven, custom, monitoring server and Oracle Database configuration, specifically to support Strata PathWays’ performance, thereby ensuring that the application is always scaled for the appropriate user base
  • Used Oracle Database Appliance to enable Strata Health to efficiently add database resources in a cost-effective manner, with no downtime
  • Improved server transaction speeds, enabling users to accomplish their tasks more quickly, leading to a better user experience
  • Leveraged the standard Strata Health SaaS process, enabling the company to become more efficient and provide more value to its customers
  • Reduced number of weekly reported runtime exceptions, from an average of 12 per week, prior to migration, to zero per week, postmigration, improving the end user experience.
  • Reduced the number of weekly reported NSForward exceptions, from an average 11 per week, prior to migration, to zero per week, postmigration, improving application availability.
  • Improved application response times; as demonstrated with the 380,000 page loads logged in the first 48 hours post migration, of which 98.6% were clocked at faster than a three-second response time
  • Reduced number of session timeouts, from 2,400 reported in early December 2012 (premigration) to 175 reported seven days later (postmigration)
  • Enabled more powerful, highly stable servers, reporting no more than 60% utilization, even during heavy usage hours

Why Oracle

“In addition to a virtualization strategy for the application servers to support both scalability and redundancy on the application layer, we chose Oracle Database Appliance for its high availability, scalability, and cost effectiveness,” said Darren Jones, chief operating officer, Strata Health Solutions Inc.

“Additionally, our comfort level with Oracle, as well as the fact that Oracle Database Appliance is a high-availability, clustered database system that includes software, servers, storage, and networking, all engineered to work together in a single box, was very attractive to us. Although we did briefly evaluate another vendor, Oracle’s experience and outstanding reputation in the healthcare marketplace really won us over,” Jones said.

Implementation Process

Strata Health selected Oracle Database Appliance in September 2011, and began by installing a circuit for a provincial public health network in an approved data center. Once the company completed that first step, in November 2012, it began Oracle Database Appliance practice migrations. In early December, Strata Health validated and tested Oracle Database Appliance, and then it went live on December 10, 2012.

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