Epic Infrastructure
What?
To implement IT infrastructure for an Epic implementation, Oakman Consulting led project teams to gather client requirements and signoff, order and install, integration test and support in production the following infrastructure initiatives:
1) centralized IT infrastructure for 7 hospitals and associated clinics, including storage area network, Data Courier, Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery, and Epic Cache Protocol load balancing layer
2) onsite IT infrastructure installations of 3700+ PC’s, printers, document scanners, and medication barcode readers
3) integrate with Epic 900 biomedical devices (patient monitors, anesthesia devices) and new patient monitoring network
Notable challenge overcome: Biomedical device integration issues – The implementaton's combination of patient monitor and middleware technologies had not been integrated with Epic before. Project team pioneered a solution that resolved these technical issues:
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Issue
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Resolution
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Middleware instances support no more than 500 devices
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Project team integrated additional middleware instances
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Middleware software had numerous ‘bugs’ preventing complete, accurate data delivery to Epic
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Project team identified the bugs; software vendors resolved bugs in subsequent releases
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Middleware’s delivery speed of Operating Room data to Epic (2-5 min) was too slow for clinicians user acceptance
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Project team redesigned technical architecture without adding more technologies to production support. Improved delivery speed of Operating Room data to Epic to a user-acceptable 1-2 minutes.
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