UPMC Building an IT architecture for improved healthcare delivery

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC; www.UPMC.com) is one of the leading non-profit health systems in the United States. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this USD$8 billion global health enterprise currently employs almost 50,000 employees.

Creating the opportunity for next-generation healthcare

UPMC, an integrated global health enterprise, was looking to lower cost and complexity of its IT infrastructure to enable the continued investment in next-generation clinical systems. UPMC had pioneered a new way of working based on the e-record, a group of systems where every bit of patient information — tests, procedures, radiology images, assessments, recommendations and medications — travels with the patient and is always available to the medical team.

Unless it could find a way to decouple the linear relationship between data and processing power, UPMC faced the creation of a new USD $80M data center to augment its existing IT processing capability. The prospect of the new data center would not only have required significant capital investment, it would have also resulted in permanently elevated management and operating costs, an increased energy footprint, and diversion of time, money and resources that could have otherwise been used to fuel continued innovation in improving patient outcomes.

UPMC worked with IBM to help it lower cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure capable of storing, managing, processing and securing its rapidly growing patient and clinical data. UPMC had also acquired several hospitals along with numerous other care facilities, complicating the IT picture.

UPMC had to address surging storage demands that had increased 328% over the last three years. Resource efficiency was another huge driver for the project. UPMC leaders saw that rising IT costs were ultimately at odds with its long-term goals around innovation and patient care, a dynamic likely to intensify given the ongoing tightening of resources in the U.S. healthcare market.

Transforming IT to exceed all expectations of performance

UPMC initiated a large scale, USD$402 million partnership with IBM, developing an IT transformation strategy carefully designed to effectively uncouple growth from cost by leveraging consolidation and standardization through virtualization technologies. Taking a phased approach, IBM has worked with UPMC to design a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure, consolidate and migrate mission-critical applications to the new system, and optimize those applications to maximize performance. Since the project was initiated, the demand for information processing volume has grown even faster than the plan’s initial aggressive expectations.


Leveraging a holistic approach to integration

UPMC worked with IBM to implement architectural changes that allowed the healthcare organization to fully integrate their environment in a holistic manner. The solution employs a common toolset based on IBM Tivoli software, enabling UPMC to centrally manage the infrastructure. UPMC combined this advanced infrastructure with a portfolio of applications that delivers a modular, standardized solution set for the health care environment. As a result, UPMC is able to quickly integrate new acquisitions into the network faster, enabling a rapid realization of the operational and clinical goals.


Securing the promise of a transformed approach to IT

One important aspect of the overall strategy was empowering UPMC to maintain control over the entire infrastructure, helping ensure the sustainability of the IT transformation. IBM worked with UPMC to achieve the appropriate level of governance, implementing a process where a central IT Architecture Board reviews new workload deployment requests. This helps ensure that these deployments meet the established IT architectural requirements.

An infrastructure primed and ready for the shift to private cloud

IBM designed and implemented a comprehensive virtualization framework for UPMC, ensuring that the redesigned infrastructure would be optimized for the eventual move to a true private cloud environment. Once this transition to private cloud is complete, UPMC will be in a position to fully realize the positive shift in IT economics that this new sourcing model will potentially deliver.

Achieving healthcare innovation through IT efficiency

Today, with the project past the halfway mark, the collaboration between UPMC and IBM has already met the original expectations—and in many ways, exceeded them. As a result of their IT transformation, UPMC achieved IT cost savings of over $160 million over 5 years. Storage technology has shortened backup times by 20 percent and recovery times by 50 percent. And consolidation efforts have eliminated the need for UPMC to create a new data center, enabling the organization to invest in life-saving healthcare innovations.

“Today most of our servers are virtual, not physical,” explains Paul Sikora, UPMC VP of IT Transformation. “The virtualized infrastructure flexes to meet processing peaks; the staff can respond to the demands of UPMC faster. We are more productive, more agile, and more reliable, at a lower cost point. I can not imagine servicing the needs of UPMC without this kind of technology and infrastructure.”