Boston Medical Center Selects Mimosa NearPoint

Mimosa Systems, Inc. announced that an academic medical facility, Boston Medical Center (BMC), has selected the Mimosa NearPoint next-generation content archiving solution to deliver eDiscovery and integrated archiving for all business critical Microsoft Exchange data including emails, calendars, contacts, tasks and deleted items.

Using Mimosa NearPoint, Boston Medical is able to meet its objective to comply with preservation requests as part of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).

Boston Medical Center is a private, not for profit, academic medical center located in Boston’s historic South End. The hospital is the primary teaching affiliate for Boston University School of Medicine. Emphasizing community-based care, BMC has a mission to provide consistently accessible health services to all and is the largest safety net hospital in New England. It provides a full spectrum of pediatric and adult care services from primary to family medicine advanced specialty care. Boston Medical also has the largest 24-hour Level One trauma center in New England.

The medical center, which is an expansive campus environment that covers three city blocks, has an equally extensive information technology infrastructure which includes an expansive number of Exchange email boxes. The hospital’s ITS department chose to implement Mimosa NearPoint over several other archiving solutions for its next-generation capabilities, ease of management, and reputation for superior customer service and support. Mimosa NearPoint offered a seamless integration with the center’s Data Domain deduplication storage systems that provide efficient storage reduction capabilities and enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery.

In addition, BMC needed to reevaluate its data retention policies which had been originally developed to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The center wanted to take a proactive approach to eDiscovery to ensure compliance with FRCP requirements and assist with the center’s long term data retention requirements.

"The FRCP requirements turned email into a critical business record," said Brad Blake, director of IT for Boston Medical Center. "Our Legal and HR departments now require the ability to discover all aspects of information within our Exchange email environment. Not just emails, but calendar items, task information as well as deletions, so that they can produce an accurate history of each business record as part of an eDiscovery request."

Initially the medical center spent about 20 hours per week to perform the manual process of crawling tapes to meet discovery requests but the process was time and resource intensive, costly, and didn’t guarantee that all information being requested would be found. That’s when BMC decided to execute an extensive RFP process to identify the best solution. The BMC ITS group, working in conjunction with the Legal and HR departments, evaluated several separate vendors identified through Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Ultimately, the medical center was looking for an email archiving solution that was easy for end users, that was searchable, and that could manage litigation holds if needed. They also sought a solution that would not impact overall Exchange server performance.

"Ultimately, we chose Mimosa for its next-generation architecture and ease of use," said Blake. "Other solutions were complex, costly and required journaling which added overhead to our Exchange environment which we simply couldn’t afford. Mimosa NearPoint also stood out from an eDiscovery perspective with its intuitive screens which have empowered our Legal and HR staff to search for and gather this information themselves thus eliminating the burden from ITS. NearPoint also has the intelligence to manage all Exchange items which can’t be done with a product that relies on journaling technology."

Boston Medical Center selected Mimosa NearPoint
because it delivered the following key features:

• Next-generation architecture: Mimosa NearPoint’s unique architecture does not require journaling or any agents on either the Exchange Server or user desktops. This ensures that there is no impact on BMC’s production Exchange Server’s performance.
• Efficient eDiscovery: Mimosa NearPoint has several features that expedite the eDiscovery process for Boston Medical Center by leveraging complete content capture. These features include individual item-level legal holds, conversation and proximity analysis, and an intuitive search within a search – while demonstrating chain of custody as archived content moves through the eDiscovery workflow.
• Intuitive self-service search of archived data: Boston Medical’s employees have seamless self-service access to their archived data, enabling them to find potentially lost or deleted messages without IT assistance.

"We are pleased to have been selected by Boston Medical Center, especially following their in depth selection process," said T.M. Ravi, CEO, Mimosa Systems. "Increasingly stringent regulations have had a significant impact in the healthcare market. As such, Mimosa is pleased to deliver a comprehensive solution to meet their growing eDiscovery and archiving requirements without impacting Exchange server performance or straining IT staff resources."