Logicalis

ALLENTOWN, Pa. - When you are responsible for guaranteeing 100 percent uptime and availability for a hospital computer system that people's lives depend on, you have to maintain the highest standards.

Richard Fronheiser, a supervisor of the network management team at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, PA counts on HP's OpenView management software to alert him to any potential problems in the three-hospital network that he oversees. Fronheiser knew there was no room for error when he wanted to upgrade OpenView on the hospital's network recently, so he called Logicalis.

Lehigh Valley is a member of the prestigious Council of Teaching Hospitals and a chief clinical campus of the Penn State University College of Medicine. One of the first "digital" hospitals in the nation, Lehigh Valley makes full use of the latest computerized technology to improve care and protect patient safety.

That technology includes Picture Archiving and Communications (PAC) Systems, an all digital Catheterization Lab, a first-of-its-kind remote Intensive Care Unit (ICU), as well as comprehensive electronic medical records, bed-tracking computer software, telemedicine for home health care, a fully wireless network, and scores of other specialized medical applications.

And that means lots of interfaces that can fail, disks that can overheat, and servers that can go down. Because of the specialized applications they must run, hospital networks are far more complex than a typical business.

Just making sure everything is running correctly consumes a tremendous amount of time. Fronheiser wanted to recover some of that time without giving up any certainty that he would be alerted immediately if anything, anywhere, looked suspicious. He knew OpenView well enough to know that it could accomplish what he wanted, but he also knew that he would need expert help to meet his demanding objectives.

Fronheiser has turned to Logicalis for that kind of help for years. Logicalis worked with the hospital to meet its hardware needs and began consulting on OpenView implementations two years ago. The most recent upgrade is a continuation of their on-going interaction.

There is a tremendous amount of mutual respect between the two organizations. "They have great people there," Logicalis account manager Carmen Hoch notes. "They are technically sophisticated and know what they want to accomplish. The move to OpenView Operations allows Lehigh Valley personnel to focus on strategic tasks while the tool monitors the operations of the system and network elements."