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Ruwaard van Putten Hospital turns to Stratus for continuous availability

Ruwaard van Putten Hospital, located in Spijkenisse, The Netherlands, is a mid-sized healthcare organisation with nearly 300 beds. It offers a range of healthcare services, including 22 specialisations, to patients from the Rotterdam area, as well as those from the nearby islands of Voorne-Putten, Rozenburg, Hoogvliet, and Albrandswaard.

When the Ruwaard van Putten Hospital decided to reduce costs and enhance operational efficiency by expanding its digital healthcare environment, it turned to Stratus Technologies and its fault-tolerant ftServer^® W Series servers for superior reliability and unmatched operational simplicity.

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Availability is critical

When demands on the hospital grew, its legacy systems simply could not cope with the increasing number of patients. Radiology costs were growing exponentially, and the management, archiving, and distribution of examination images and results required significant effort and resources. Knowing that availability of information would become increasingly critical, the Ruwaard van Putten Hospital decided to digitise its radiology department.

Agfa Corporation was selected as the preferred vendor for the digitisation project, including the integration of RIS (Radiology Information System) and PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System). It was essential to support these solutions with a reliable, fault-tolerant server in order to optimize continuous uptime. In addition, the server needed to be in line with previous investments and integrate with the hospital's existing Microsoft^® Windows^® 2000 operating system and SAN (Storage Area Network) environment.

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Industry-standard, fault-tolerant servers

Initially, the Ruwaard van Putten Hospital looked at a cluster solution for their availability requirements. Then Agfa introduced the hospital to their availability partner - Stratus Technologies and their industry-standard, fault-tolerant ftServer W Series family of servers.

The ease of operation and reliability of the Stratus servers won over the project team. The new solution easily met project requirements, and would also eliminate the complexity and high costs inherent in other high-availability solutions, such as clustering. In addition, Stratus' proven Continuous Processing^® technology provided 99.999% uptime protection for their Microsoft Windows environments.

In March 2004, Agfa started the rollout with the installation of two Stratus^® ftServer W Series 3300 systems - one for archiving purposes and the other for distribution of examination images and results. This served as the backbone for the gradual rollout and integration of the Agfa solutions, including a PACSbroker server and the PACS solutions.

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ftServer systems for reliable and secure operations

One year later, Ruwaard van Putten Hospital's experience has confirmed that partnering with Stratus was the right decision. Guglielmo de Walderstein, project assistant for the ICT Department at Ruwaard van Putten Hospital, comments: "Stratus offered us a fault-tolerant system at a price far more competitive than any clustering solution. In addition to the reduced upfront investment, we've been able to cut the costs of continuous support expenses and downtime."

The new digital radiology environment has given the hospital a new and more efficient way of working. Records are immediately available around the clock and can be distributed easily among healthcare professionals as required. Hospital staff credit the new digital environment for improved production cycles, that, in turn, enhance efficiency and improve the levels of patient care.

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Looking to the future: optimised operations

Ruwaard van Putten Hospital is already looking to expand its digital environment to include mammography. Other uses for the new digital technology, supported by Stratus' faulttolerant servers, are also being evaluated. Guglielmo de Walderstein concludes: "We are increasingly experiencing the benefits of the Stratus solution. Not only have we been able to reduce our costs and optimise our operations, we now have a solution that we can rely on completely as we set out to offer higher levels of service and care to our patients."

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