Vancouver Coastal Health Ensures Near-100% Availability of Vital Patient Data with Real-Time Data Integration Solution
 
 

Vancouver Coastal Health Ensures Near-100% Availability of Vital Patient Data with Real-Time Data Integration Solution

  • Oracle Customer:  Vancouver Coastal Health
    Location:  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
    Industry:  Healthcare
    Employees:  20,000
    Annual Revenue:  $1 to $5 Billion

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Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) is the second largest provincial healthcare system in Canada. It serves approximately one-quarter of British Columbia’s population, totaling more than 1 million citizens across Vancouver, Richmond, the North Shore and Coast Garibaldi, Sea-to-Sky, Sunshine Coast, Powell River, Bella Bella, and Bella Coola. Each year, its 22,000 staff members, 2,500 physicians, and 5,000 volunteers deliver more than 3 million patient days of care, seeing an average of 308,000 people in the emergency department and 640,000 in clinics, and providing 2.3 million residential care days, 1.9 million home support hours, and 199,000 nursing home visits.

VCH has been charged with spearheading a government initiative to introduce electronic health records (EHRs). It began with a pilot project to introduce paperless clinical documentation and expand its Primary Care Information System (PCIS) to accommodate EHR files. Oracle GoldenGate has been instrumental in this project because it helps to ensure availability of PCIS, which is now the central repository for all patient information—from labs and results, to demographics, to pharmacy information, and more. This vital system contains 1.2 terabytes of data that is essential to hospital operations and, ultimately, to the lives of VCH’s patients.

The information system requires periodic downtime for maintenance, but VCH needs to complete that maintenance quickly and ensure that, outside of scheduled downtime, it has near-100% availability. Oracle GoldenGate helps VCH to achieve this goal.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Vancouver Coastal Health

  • “Oracle GoldenGate ensures near-100% availability of the vital patient information that thousands of our clinicians count on each day, while enabling IT to conduct maintenance required to keep the system performing well.” – Ardiel Soeker, Tandem Technical Lead, Information Management Information Technology Services, Vancouver Coastal Health

  • Facilitate a government initiative to introduce EHRs by establishing a reliable, scalable IT infrastructure for a health system that includes three major hospitals and two rehabilitation centers
  • Reduce the window of time that PCIS is unavailable to more than 10,000 clinicians, who rely on it to make vital health decisions, by using a redundant environment with up-to-date information
  • Lay the foundation for a disaster recovery platform, which is important in an earthquake-prone area

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed Oracle GoldenGate to enable users to access a replicated copy of PCIS data during routine quarterly maintenance to ensure consistent visibility into vital patient information
  • Enabled VCH to track and update data changed during the maintenance cycle, enabling users to smoothly switch back to the transactional system when maintenance is complete
  • Reduced scheduled downtime from four-to-six hours to just two-to-three hours
  • Enabled rapid switchover to the replicated system, which also protects PCIS from outages due to unplanned failure of one or more components
  • Used the copy version for reporting and data extraction, separating these processes from daily activities for patient care to reduce demand on the system and ensure high performance for clinicians  
  • Leveraged Oracle GoldenGate Veridata to match the two databases weekly, comparing and ensuring the two databases are an exact match

Implementation Process

VCH went live on Oracle GoldenGate in March 2011. It worked with Oracle Consulting to ensure an efficient and seamless go live, relying on the deployment team’s in-depth product and best-practice knowledge.