Oracle Customer Success—Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA a.s.b.l.

Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA Ensures 100% Uptime for Mission-Critical IT Services

Our hospital employees depend on continuous and secure data availability to ensure quality patient care. Oracle Database Appliance feeds the heart of our hospital by providing an essential unified hardware and software solution for the uninterrupted functioning of all hospital processes across all sites—from laboratories, to specialized medical wards.

— Bruno Liénard, CIO, Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA a.s.b.l.

The Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA a.s.b.l. is a regional medical center in Belgium, resulting from the merger of two hospitals in 2012. With 875 beds across three sites, as well as four outpatient clinics and three medical laboratories, the center provides a complete range of medical services, including separate care for mothers and children. Every year, the hospital’s 400 doctors—along with external consultants—conduct more than 400,000 patient consultations and treat nearly 60,000 emergency room patients, providing vital and optimal healthcare services to local residents.

Business Challenge

Consolidate IT infrastructure following a hospital merger, while increasing IT system availability and the stability of systems based on hardware and software components from diverse vendors and that occasionally crashed due to complexity
Increase storage capacity to manage combined clinical and operational data from two hospitals, while allowing further scalability for annual growth in data volume due to increased numbers of patients and expanded medical research
Simplify database maintenance and minimize system-tuning tasks, so the hospital’s DBAs can focus on optimizing database performance, rather than dealing with IT-component integration and incompatibility problems through multiple external vendors

Results

Facilitated the hospital merger without affecting IT performance by deploying Oracle Database Appliance as a cost-effective consolidation platform to replace an overly complex IT infrastructure—including IBM servers, Red Hat Enterprise operating system, and NetApp disk drives
Consolidated the hospitals’ 14 databases onto a single, centralized Oracle Database Appliance, with a shared network across multiple hospital sites—easing management of the hospital’s 1 TB of data

Ensured a high-level of system stability to manage all types of hospital data—including 146 GB of electronic patient medical records as well as operational data—a great improvement over the previous setup which caused servers to occasionally crash
Ensured that patient data is constantly available to approximately 1,000 concurrent users—including hospital staff and 450 independent physicians, such as medical department specialists and surgeons—executing tens of thousands of database queries daily to ensure optimum patient care
Replaced near end-of-life NetApp disks with Oracle Database Appliance to free up 1 TB of storage space, providing scalability to comfortably manage a 10% year-on-year increase in total data volume—including a 20% increase from the hospital’s laboratories, which currently conduct more than 2 million transactions every week and use 400 GB of storage space
Deployed a fully redundant, integrated, and preconfigured database appliance with the world’s leading database, substantially reducing database licensing costs and easing scalability through capacity-on-demand licensing
Deployed a second Oracle Database Appliance with Oracle Active Data Guard—serving as a backup with real-time copy of all data across all hospital sites—to ensure zero interruption of IT services on which medical staff depend to manage and treat 39,000 hospitalized patients annually
Simplified database management and tuning complexity, thanks to the preconfigured and tested Oracle Database Appliance solution—reducing the time DBAs spend on system compatibility and integration issues and enabling them to focus on managing and enhancing database performance

Our tradition of building our hospital’s mission-critical databases on Oracle has brought us much satisfaction. Choosing Oracle Database Appliance enabled us to solve infrastructure stability issues and optimize our database licensing costs, in addition to providing a combined software and hardware solution with a single vendor, so we no longer need to worry about compatibility issues. Furthermore, we now have the ability to easily scale, using a preconfigured solution that suits all data-management requirements across our hospital sites.

— Bruno Liénard, CIO, Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA a.s.b.l.

About Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA a.s.b.l.

Headquarters

Baudour, Belgium

Employees

2,400

Centre Hospitalier EpiCURA a.s.b.l.

Partners

Uptime Technologies NV, an Oracle Platinum Level Partner, performed product review and design consulting in addition to installing and configuring EpiCURA’s first Oracle Database Appliance. Uptime Technologies’ consultants played an integral role in the initial database migration, and trained EpiCURA’s IT staff, which enabled them to successfully install the second Oracle Database Appliance as a backup device.

Oracle Solutions Used

Oracle Database Appliance

Oracle Active Data Guard

Engineered Systems

Published: Nov 13, 2014