2 page Case Study - Posted 2/3/2009

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Erlanger Health System

Healthcare Organization Increases System Stability, Productivity with New E-Mail Solution

Erlanger Health System is a growing, multisite healthcare organization serving residents in four states. The organization’s e mail system was susceptible to downtime, and its mobile users needed e mail access from their cell phones. Erlanger implemented a new messaging solution based on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007. Now, Erlanger has a more stable system, can increase storage capacity as needed, and has boosted mobile employees’ productivity.

Business Needs

Erlanger Health System is a multihospital healthcare organization based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Serving the healthcare needs of citizens in parts of Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina, Erlanger is a regional leader in the treatment of cancer, high-risk obstetrics, and heart and vascular disease. Each year, more than 250,000 people are treated by Erlanger healthcare professionals.

Our physicians are basically our customers. We have a responsibility to provide them with a stable messaging environment, and we can do that with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.  Laurene Vamprine Vice President and Chief Information Officer Erlanger Health System

“Stability and availability were big challenges,” says Doug Oliver, Systems Engineer, Erlanger Health System. “It was not uncommon to have several instances of downtime, each lasting up to an hour, every week.”

“That was unacceptable because a lot of nurses rely on e-mail to get messages to members of their care teams, 24 hours a day,” says Lamar Matherley, System Lead, Erlanger Health System. Additionally, many of the company’s routine business processes relied on e-mail messaging. Everything from purchasing, incident reporting, contract reviews, and budgeting was impacted by each outage or performance issue.

E-mail storage was another concern. “We lacked the ability to put mailbox storage limits in place,” says Matherley. “Without those limits, system storage was unnecessarily tied up by data that was never accessed.”

Erlanger also wanted to better serve the needs of its remote workers, who work at multiple clinics and need up-to-the-minute scheduling information. Mobile e-mail functionality on cell phones was becoming critical for many nurses and support staff.

Erlanger began looking for a more stable messaging solution with mobile support in April 2007.

Solution

Erlanger started its search by contacting Franklin, Tennessee–based Core BTS, a technology firm it had worked with on a previous project. Core BTS, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is a regional IT business consulting firm that specializes in collaborative business technology solutions. Core BTS recommended that Erlanger upgrade to the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration environment to take advantage of features such as improved out-of-the-box high availability, disaster recovery and clustering capabilities. The 2007 version also offers Erlanger users rich access to their Inboxes through Outlook Web Access and a familiar Office Outlook–based experience on a range of mobile devices.

Beginning in December 2007, Core BTS worked closely with Erlanger to migrate the healthcare organization’s e-mail environment from Exchange Server 2000 to Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. During deployment, Core BTS provided rapid host-based failure recovery to the messaging environment by implementing an Exchange Server 2007 two-node, single-copy mailbox cluster. The company also increased mailbox capacity by taking advantage of Exchange Server 2007 mailbox store scalability.

Core BTS also helped Erlanger set up all mobile devices on Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® technology so that mobile employees can send and receive e-mail messages from their cell phones. The migration was completed in early 2008.

Benefits

With Exchange Server 2007, Erlanger Health System has increased system stability and improved e-mail message storage capacity, which is important for future organizational growth. Additionally, the organization’s mobile employees can be more productive.

Increases System Stability. With Exchange Server 2007, Erlanger has a system that is more stable. “Now, with the cluster environment, they have the built-in fault tolerance they required, and they are receiving 99.999 percent uptime, which is a big improvement,” says Jason Cook, Principal Consultant, Core BTS.

Vamprine adds, “Our physicians are basically our customers. We have a responsibility to provide them with a stable messaging environment, and we can do that with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.”

Improves Storage Capacity. With the updated messaging system, Erlanger was able to provide large, low-cost mailboxes for the entire organization or for individuals. “That gave us the ability to set storage limits, which was important,” Oliver states. “The new system was specified to not only handle the current load, but also scale to future growth, so we will have the storage and power we need.” Additionally, the new environment runs in a 64-bit environment, which means the system can access much more memory. Now, Erlanger IT administrators will be able to greatly increase employees’ e-mail storage capabilities as the system expands in coming years.

Helps Mobile Employees Be More Productive. Now, Erlanger employees can access important e-mail messages and information on their cell phones. “That is critical for physicians and nurses and other clinical staff, as well as business and administrative staff,” says Vamprine. “They can receive meeting notices on their phones through Exchange ActiveSync or access their e-mail or task lists from anywhere using Office Outlook Web Access in Exchange Server 2007.” These capabilities will help mobile Erlanger workers become more productive.

“No matter if our employees are in an office or off-site, they now have better access to information using Exchange Server 2007,” says Vamprine.

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Document published January 2009