“We need a maximum of stability and availability for our 24/7 use of our groupware solution,” says University Hospital CIO Dieter Moritz.
The University Hospital of Cologne is one of Germany’s leading academic medical centers. It employs over 6,000 medical personnel and support staff, and trains over 3,500 students, to conduct research and provide care for over 50,000 inpatients and 150,000 outpatients annually.
The Challenge
Rapid advances in medical technology, especially in the fields of computer-assisted diagnosis and therapy, require highly sophisticated information technology (IT) systems. Care providers moving between classrooms, examining rooms, and even home offices, need uninterrupted access to medical information such as patient records, test results, and reference texts. The administrative and personnel challenges faced by modern hospitals like University Hospital are equally intense. In addition to email, calendar, contact and task management, today’s health professionals require robust document exchange and groupware solutions. For instance, a growing number of University Hospital departments need to service collaborative, searchable databases they have created to facilitate knowledge sharing. These IT systems must be extremely reliable and secure, as well as remotely accessible.
The Solution
Because the majority of communication at the University Hospital occurs over email, the IT staff found that it was best for their 3,500 coworkers to have email access on all of the Hospital’s Internet-enabled computers, as well as at home. In order to administer over 3,500 individual email accounts efficiently in such a dynamic work environment, the IT Department of the University Clinical Center decided to migrate from Novell’s SUSE Linux Server to a browser-based mail client. By moving from a fat mail client to a web-based client, staffing for user support could be cut by two thirds since no installation or significant support was necessary, the IT Department found.
Selecting Open-Xchange
At the University Hospital, as in the health care vertical market at large, Linux is catching on. Today, most of the University Hospital’s server applications work on Linux or Unix, so the IT Department was already familiar with the advantages of open source solutions. Like the University Hospital’s old SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the Open-Xchange Server works on IBM servers a x366, equipped with 8 GB RAM and four Xeon CPUs with 3.66 GHz. Over two FC adapters the disk place are secured redundantly in two storage area networks (SAN).
The IT Department also found that, due to its open interfaces, Open-Xchange Server could be used to support a host of other empowering applications. For example, University Hospital system administrators found that user data, which is captured in OpenLDAP, could also be used to populate the Hospital Intranet’s internal directory—m aking it possible to find coworkers using a phonetic search. This and other features convinced University Hospital CIO Dieter Moritz that Open-Xchange was a good solution available.
As a result, in 2006 the University Hospital chose to move 3,500 accounts onto an Open-Xchange Server. In the coming months, Moritz says, the University Hospital intends to move the Open-Xchange Server onto a server farm in order to enhance overall performance, and better distribute a growing load.
Impact of Open-Xchange
Open-Xchange’s ability to get e-mail on any computer with an Internet connection, whether at home or on the road – was a major selling point for the hospital. Beyond basic messaging – e-mail, calendar and contacts – Open-Xchange’s document sharing capabilities becomes more and more a popular and a likely used functionality at the hospital.
For additional information about the University Hospital of Cologne please visit www.uk-koeln.de.
