eClinicalWorks Uses Several EMC CLARiiONs

EMC Corporation announced that eClinicalWorks, in ambulatory clinical systems with more than 25,000 healthcare provider customers, has consolidated and enhanced security of its IT infrastructure using EMC, RSA and VMware solutions.

As a result, eClinicalWorks has successfully managed rapid business growth, dramatically lowered operational costs and increased the availability and reliability of its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) EMR solution.

Matt Lewis, eClinicalWorks’ general manager of information systems and Software as a Service (SaaS), said: "The EMR has become the number one technology best practice to help healthcare providers deliver better patient care and increase efficiency. The increasing demand for EMRs has caused our business to grow by approximately 460 percent over the last three years. We anticipate our growth to continue at a fast rate into at least the next year."

As part of its information infrastructure, eClinicalWorks relies on EMC CLARiiON to store patient data for hospitals and medical practices hosting their EMR applications at eClinicalWorks datacenters. Eight datacenters house CLARiiON Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions and serve as production sites and disaster recovery destinations for the other datacenters, where its CLARiiON systems are installed. eClinicalWorks uses EMC MirrorView software and EMC SnapView to support its disaster recovery plan and to enable compliance with HIPAA.

"In two years, we’ve built eight new datacenters," said Lewis. "However, through consolidation, we’ve reduced our operational costs by 40 percent, enabling us to absorb a 65 percent increase in power rates over the last three years without having to raise the price of our hosted services."

Based in Westborough, Mass., eClinicalWorks used VMware ESX server to consolidate physical servers as virtual machines, which are stored on the EMC CLARiiON systems.

"With virtualization, we’ve consolidated our server infrastructure by a factor of 7:1. Not only are we buying fewer servers, but the cost to administer virtual machines is far less than physical servers and we can bring up a new virtual machine in a day. This has enabled us to support a 1,000-server environment with less staff and channel more people into other activities to improve the quality of our offerings."

To help meet the new ARRA HITECH HIPAA security and privacy requirements, eClinicalWorks is deploying the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication system and the RSA enVision security event management platform. These solutions will help to secure access to its data centers and provide collection, alerting and analysis of log data.

"RSA SecurID adds a layer of protection to prevent unauthorized people from gaining access to our infrastructure," said Lewis. "The auditing tools provided through RSA enVision allow us to proactively analyze datacenter logs and correlate events to make sure there’s no suspicious activity taking place."

Lewis added: "EMC has been very strategic to us in ensuring our datacenter architectures are able to support our growth and new requirements. We’re constantly in discussions with EMC engineers to review our architecture and roadmap and see what technology changes are needed to make sure we’re on track to address SLAs, efficiency objectives, security needs and other changes coming down the road."