To manage the healthcare data of tribal members throughout the country, the IHS chose Apple Xserve for its reliability and simple administration.
Curing System Unreliability with Apple Xserve
The federal government’s commitment to providing healthcare services to Native Americans stretches back to the 1700s, when the country was young and the medical system was subject to far less oversight. Today, the Indian Health Service (IHS) counts among its duties the management and tracking of patient cases and the fulfillment of stringent regulatory and legal requirements to ensure that all patients receive excellent care.
A 144-office agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, the IHS oversees the consistent delivery of high-quality care to more than 1.5 million American Indians and Alaska Natives living in the United States. To manage healthcare data throughout the country, the IHS turned to Apple technology. Using Xserve servers, Mac OS X and MySQL software to develop custom applications, the agency has enhanced productivity, reduced downtime and improved its monitoring of spending on patient benefits, such as prescription drugs.
Downtime Takes a Toll on Productivity
The IHS was using a system that incorporated a number of different platforms when it began looking for an alternative that would provide both more reliability and simpler administration. At the time, the agency depended on Dell PowerEdge servers, RedHat’s Linux operating platform and the InterSystems Caché database platform to store and retrieve millions of discrete pieces of critical medical information.
We had deadlines to meet and couldn't afford to be out of commission. We needed a server platform that was reliable enough to support a mission-critical environment.
— Mike Pike
“Many times even the simplest processes just wouldn’t work,” says Mike Pike, information technology specialist for IHS. “No one at the various companies that supplied our hardware and operating systems seemed able to help us solve the problems, and we’d lose weeks of production time. We had deadlines to meet and couldn’t afford to be out of commission. We needed a server platform that was reliable enough to support a mission-critical environment.”
Reliability — From a Less Expensive System
In evaluating the options for replacing its existing operating system and network of servers, the IHS compared leading hardware platforms, including a number of Linux-based systems and the Apple Xserve. The IHS chose the Xserve with the Mac OS X Server operating system based on price, reliability and support.
The Apple system offered advantages that the IHS knew would help reduce day-to-day system maintenance demands on the IT team: the iron-clad stability of UNIX coupled with superior ease of use. “Because the operating system and hardware work together seamlessly, updating the software and hardware is straightforward,” says Pike. “In healthcare, we don’t have time to deal with daily exploits, hot fixes and service packs. With Xserve and Mac OS X, we no longer suffer through days of downtime when we make changes to our system.”