Dicle University Hospital improves patient experience with Oracle

Due to an ever-increasing number of patients, the hospital’s IT operations were unable to scale to manage the vast amounts of data needed to ensure an optimal patient experience, which included the ability to schedule appointments, view test results, and communicate with doctors online.

The hospital also had to comply with Turkish government regulations, which require hospitals to upload patient data to an “E-Pulse” portal on a daily basis. Diyarbakir Dicle University Hospital has ten different data sets, each with around 100,000 records that need to be uploaded daily. If it was seen to be non-compliant, the hospital would receive lower points in the government’s official rating system. Delays in data uploads would also mean the hospital could not issue invoices to the Social Security Administration on time.

Another challenge for the hospital was to eliminate downtime in peak hours so that employees could access the hospital information management system without delays.

In addition, the previous setup left no scope for a disaster recovery environment, which was a pressing need for Diyarbakir Dicle University Hospital.

Diyarbakır Dicle University Hospital had to comply with stringent government regulations, while at the same time cater to increasing patient requirements. Its previous system was vulnerable to failure due to upgrades and reporting requirements. The hospital deployed the Hospital Information Management System and the E-Result application using Oracle Database while keeping costs under control, reducing downtime due to planned and unplanned outages, and simplifying IT administration, without compromising on patient experience.

Diyrbakir Dicle University Hospital chose Oracle Database Appliance for its integrated package of software, compute, networking, and storage to support efforts to improve patient services and address future growth.

The hospital developed an E-Result portal on Oracle Database Enterprise Edition to enable patients to reserve appointments, directly connect with doctors, and view test results via its mobile application. Previously, patients had to wait anywhere between a few hours to more than a day for test results, which were delivered in paper format. Now all patients receive test results and other data online.

By deploying Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture with Oracle Real Application Clusters to reduce planned or unplanned downtime and ensure high availability, the hospital could rely on continuous business operations.

Other benefits of migrating to Oracle included reduced wait times for patients by 75% in areas such as patient reports, prescriptions, telemedicine, and sharing patient data with the E-Pulse application.

Data upload time to E-Pulse was reduced from 180 minutes to 45 minutes. Diyarbakir Dicle University Hospital is now uploading data once every 6 hours.

Utilizing Data Guard for physical data redundancy and protection allows data to remain in passive mode and to be recovered in the event of a disaster. Archive logs are sent every 20 minutes to the backup server.

Finally, by leveraging Oracle Database Appliance’s flexible licensing model, the total cost of ownership decreased.

Probel Software offers consulting and support services for Oracle database solutions. With its expert staff, it helps customers use resources more efficiently and maximize information security through customers’ databases performing more efficiently and securely.

“By working with the key stakeholders at Diyarbakır Dicle University Hospital, we were able to set up an Oracle Database environment that provides high performance and disaster recovery,” said Ziya Bolgönül, general manager of Probel Software.