University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)

UPMC, a US$6,000,000,000 integrated healthcare enterprise, is the largest employer in western Pennsylvania and one of the most renowned academic medical centers in the United States. With 43,000 employees, it comprises 19 hospitals, a network of other care sites, an insurance division, and international and commercial ventures.

Business challenge
During the past decade, through multiple acquisitions of unrelated healthcare provider organizations, UPMC has reshaped the healthcare landscape in western Pennsylvania. Each new hospital in the network added to the complexity of the organization; each new system added to the complexity of its IT infrastructure. In order to deliver highly integrated, efficient care in the face of this rapid growth and industry pressures, UPMC recognized that enterprise-wide IT systems, data integration and platform standardization were crucial for its quality and business integration goals, and to achieve the economies of scale expected to accrue from these acquisitions.

This leading innovator in the application of IT to medicine sought to become a truly integrated, self-regulating health care system, utilizing evidence-based medicine to produce superb clinical outcomes and lower costs. To transform its information technology (IT) infrastructure, it needed a partner that could help it approach the transformation from three broad but interrelated aspects – people, process, and technology – with the goal of building a stable, flexible and cost-efficient foundation for future IT innovation.

Solution
UPMC and IBM have embarked on a landmark strategic partnership – the Information Technology Service Transformation Program (ITSTP) – valued at $402 million over eight years. IBM Integrated Technology Services and IBM Global Business Services will work with UPMC to consolidate, standardize, and virtualize the UPMC server environment and implement an organizational and operational environment modeled around the IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®). IBM virtualization technology, combined with IBM management tools, helps provide high availability for every application and helps simplify the management of the total infrastructure. This partnership is not only a first of a kind for healthcare but has propelled the medical organization into an IT leadership position across all industries. The actual transformation of the IT environment is expected to take three years.

Benefits

• Ability to provide – the right information at the right time in the right place – to improve patient care
• Verified IT cost savings of more than 20%; estimated savings over the course of the transformation period will conservatively range from $18 to 22 million
• Major increase in efficiency through server consolidation and virtualization
• Increased cost predictability through IBM Open Infrastructure Offering (OIO) financing model
• Increased flexibility to grow systems and add new technologies by virtue of open systems support