Baton Rouge-Based Woman’s Hospital Selects Venyu

Venyu Solutions Inc. announced that Baton Rouge-based Woman’s Hospital, one of the first women’s specialty hospitals in the nation recognized throughout the country for programs for superior care of women and infants, has selected the company’s data center and backup and recovery services to ensure its preparedness for emergencies post Hurricane Katrina.

“Katrina hit the South hard, and opened up a lot of vulnerabilities for our hospital,” said Paul Kirk, VP of information system, Woman’s Hospital Foundation. “This was due to the fact that we are one of a handful of hospitals designated by the state as an ‘Airhead’ – a large enough neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to take in and care for all neonatal infants in our area during an emergency. However, we learned that if we could not support the IT infrastructure for events like Katrina, we would lose our Airhead status. During Katrina, Woman’s Hospital cared for infants with no medical records transported with them. Handwritten notes were placed in babies’ incubators by doctors from the sending hospitals. With infants typically monitored through computer systems, doctors at other hospitals figured out patient needs on paper and stayed at bedside for monitoring. Having critical information at the right time makes all the difference, and we realized if we had a remote site backed up to other facilities, we could have accessed important information.”

To keep its Airhead designation, the hospital looked to Venyu to provide a site where it could bring up their servers in case they lost their data center, and the relationship grew from there.

According to Kirk, “We calculated we could get seven years of Venyu services with the amount of money it would cost to build our own backup data center.”

Over time, Woman’s added additional Venyu hosting, connectivity and backup services, with a snapshot copy of their SAN. Today, Venyu hosts one of Woman’s most critical system 100% of physician office data including billing, electronic medical records, and office files for 64 physicians and their staff of approximately 350, all with a careful eye on meeting HIPAA compliance.

“We have a deep level of comfort with Venyu’s security and HIPAA compliance capabilities. Not only do they consistently show us their security levels, but they are also the chosen vendor of our compliance auditor,” added Kirk.

“It’s not just the facility but the people running it that makes Venyu our outsourcing vendor. I know if there is a problem I can pick up the phone and they will be there to help. It’s the feeling you get when you work with Venyu and the strong relationship you need,” continued Kirk. “With Venyu, our network engineers can now sleep at night. With their replicated sites hardened in other parts of the country, I know if we have to recover data in the future it will not be an issue. Healthcare”

“Organizations have a great deal to contend with, backing up digital records and data recovery should not be among them,” said Scott Thompson, CEO, Venyu. “Working with Woman’s Hospital, we help to alleviate some of the IT burden so the medical staff can concentrate on what’s most important – patient care.”

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