Data Management At North America's First Fully Digital Hospital

When Humber River Hospital opened its new fully digital hospital on October 18, 2015, it marked a decade of partnering with BridgeHead Software to store and protect patient data at one of Canada’s largest regional acute care hospitals and set the stage for continuing to make improvements in accessing patient data.

Humber River Hospital has established an impressive history of firsts in patient care and service, including establishing Ontario’s first Center of Excellence for laparoscopic bariatric surgery, first nocturnal dialysis program, and first community hospital in Canada to acquire and use a surgical robot. Similarly, Humber River Hospital leveraged BridgeHead’s expertise with MEDITECH to provide backup for the hospital’s MEDITECH environment. Having partnered with MEDITECH since 2001, today BridgeHead is the company’s solo vendor in the market with a data protection and management solution.

A long time MEDITECH MAGIC customer, in 2006, Humber River became one of the first Canadian hospitals to adapt BridgeHead’s integrated server-less backup solution to provide multiple daily data backups to protect the hospital’s MEDITECH healthcare information systems. Humber River also used MEDITECH’s scanning and archiving solution to store and protect all healthcare information online.

In seeking solutions to better manage critical data, Humber River Hospital continued to turn to BridgeHead. When Humber River upgraded its EHR to MEDITECH 6.0, the hospital decided to centralize IT resources and improve the organization’s disaster recovery capabilities for clinical and administrative data, including new backup and archive functionality from BridgeHead. Hospital leadership was concerned about the cost to the organization of managing multiple maintenance contracts with multiple vendors and the cost and time needed to train IT staff on redundant approaches and systems.

The overall goal was to reduce Humber River’s operating costs while allowing the IT team to provide an even higher level of service to the hospital. BridgeHead helped the hospital meet all its objectives and more, allowing Humber River Hospital to extend the BridgeHead Healthcare Data Management (HDM) platform to consolidate backup and archiving systems and reduce costs. Humber River Hospital continues to rely on BridgeHead to stay on top of burgeoning data management demands.

“We grew from the first 13-server MAGIC environment to a client server 6.0 upgrade and BridgeHead backing up 60 to 80 servers to BridgeHead being our sole enterprise backup solution today, backing up close to 300 servers,” says Kevin Fernandes, chief technology officer, Humber River.

Fernandes addressed the urgency in quickly recovering data, saying, “When we had to do a MEDITECH restore, BridgeHead was able to recover the patient information within an hour or two. Usually it took five to eight hours before we got resolution from other vendors.”

Both Fernandes and Othman Khan, senior technical analyst at Humber River Hospital, noted BridgeHead’s ongoing and readily available professional services. Comprehensive performance audits of the backup system ensure the system is running at optimum efficiency and efficacy so there is minimum downtime in a disaster. Regular review also ensures the IT staff is updated on procedures and that the hospital achieves the maximum business impact from its backup system.

According to Fernandes, “When we call in any issues, we’re able to resolve them quickly. BridgeHead is also very proactive, informing us of any new technology coming out of their service pipeline. BridgeHead helps us look at how we do business, helping us develop best practices as our environment grows.”

When construction of the new building began in 2011, Humber River Hospital tapped BridgeHead’s healthcare data management expertise to help them in planning and facilitating its move from the outdated legacy sites to its new fully digital hospital facility.

“In partnership with Dell, BridgeHead helped us develop an architectural design for best performance in the new hospital,” Fernandes says, “helping us move from a full tape backup strategy to partial tape strategy to online disk backup at the new site.”

Because the HDM platform underlies all BridgeHead solutions, it will allow Humber River Hospital to leverage its investment to further provide access to clinical information and improve care. As Humber River Hospital’s data management needs continue to evolve, the HDM platform provides a runway to BridgeHead’s Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), a key clinical application for real-time healthcare delivery. Because the ICA handles all types of clinical data from any type of application, it provides a reliable solution for advancing strategic initiatives like the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM), enhancing new integrated patient record initiatives, application retirement and Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE).

Both Humber River Hospital and BridgeHead Software are dedicated to providing high-quality patient care cost-effectively. Down the road, as data management requirements change and grow, Humber River Hospital leadership knows it has a proven and trusted advisor in BridgeHead to lean on for storing, protecting and sharing patient data across the continuum of care, the community and the region.