Abstract
[Background and Objectives] In 2006, we implemented an integrated hospital information system in which 30 departmental subsystems have been connected with an electronic medical record system under a multi-vendor environment. The system consists of 110 physical servers and storages. Six years later, however, we faced the necessity to adopt countermeasures for depletion of computer resources and lack of storage capacity. Age-related deterioration and expire of warranty of these equipments have been also serious issues. The estimated cost for renewal of the servers and storages was calculated to be too costly to implement. [Methods] To this end, we made a renewal list of individual subsystems in order of priority, and then, examined effects of advanced information technologies including server virtualization on the system renewal by a feasibility study on the basis of functionality, flexibility, availability stability and cost. [Results and Discussion] The feasibility study showed that conventional renewal procedures at vender's recommendation is costly, and sometimes restrict the flexibility and availability for most subsystems. The study also revealed that user-led design/development for total optimization of the integrated system is important to establish a flexible and stable integrated system with a reasonable cost. We report here a suitable approach for the renewal of an integrated hospital information system by eliminating a vendor lock-in from the system infrastructure including hardware such as servers and storages using virtualization solutions.
