Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST Server Deployed for Integrated Hospital Information System at Nagoya University Hospital

Tokyo, March 09, 2007

Fujitsu Limited today announced that Nagoya University Hospital in Japan has deployed Fujitsu's PRIMEQUEST mission-critical IA server for its new integrated hospital information system. The system is a complete platform for the entire hospital services, including the electronic medical record system and other systems such as examination systems in each department. The new system provided by Fujitsu consists of a PRIMEQUEST server, PRIMERGY BX620 S3 blade servers, and ETERNUS storage systems. Integrating PC servers onto the PRIMEQUEST server enables the time required to access electronic medical records to be reduced to approximately one-third the time that was previously needed. The new system has been operating since January 2007.

Background on System Upgrade

Nagoya University Hospital, one of the core medical institutions in central Japan, sees approximately 500,000 outpatients per year and has 29 departments and 1,035 beds. The hospital has been an early-adopter of health information technology (HIT), such as implementing an electronic medical record system in 2002.

The integrated hospital information system brings together electronic medical record system and systems for each of the hospital's departments, including accounting, examinations, radiology, and surgical operations. In addition to outpatients, the system also handles inpatient medical data, meaning it must run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Of all of these systems, in particular the electronic medical record system must have high-speed responsiveness to enable prompt data entry and viewing of patient data during a medical examination.

The new system integrates eight PC servers that had been running the electronic medical record system onto a single PRIMEQUEST 580 mission-critical IA server. Electronic medical records can be accessed in one-third the time previously required, through high-speed data processing enabled by the Caché high performance object database management system from InterSystems, and by maximizing PRIMEQUEST's expanded memory. In addition, PRIMEQUEST's partitioning function⁽¹⁾ makes it possible for the hardware resources in the chassis to be divided into multiple system configurations, and to connect each configuration to one of the ETERNUS 4000 model 300 midrange disk array storage systems, thereby enabling system redundancy and increased reliability.

PRIMERGY BX620 S3 blade servers are being used as departmental servers, and by taking advantage of the SAN Boot feature, hardware failures can be resolved simply by flipping a SAN switch. This reallocates the system disk of the failed blade, starts the boot up process, and brings the system back online quickly.