Stanford Hospital and Clinics Switches to Ensemble for a Healthcare SOA Foundation

Stanford Hospital and Clinics has secured a place on U.S. News & World Report magazine’s Best Hospitals in the United States honor roll for each of the past seven years. “The quality of our medical staff is the main reason we so consistently rank high in the U.S. News & World Report list,” says Anita Brewer, Stanford Hospital’s director of IT architecture and innovation. “But our IT innovations also are key. The timely access to accurate information that our applications provide is critical to clinical safety and success.”

Stanford’s long-term clinical information strategy calls for seamless integration and communication among multiple applications and data repositories. But the hospital’s legacy interface engine was not up to the task. After a six-month search for a technology replacement, the Stanford IT group chose Ensemble, from InterSystems. “Ensemble will help us maintain and improve our level of care,” Brewer notes, “and keep us on the Best Hospitals list for years to come.”

Key factors for Stanford in its choice of Ensemble included:

 

  • A built-in, high-performance database with automatic persistence of messages and other data

  • The ability to easily trace messages and locate problems if any occur

  • Support for Web services and service oriented architecture

  • Rapid creation of dashboards and physician portals

“Ensemble is so visual and easily understandable that our team of IT architects quickly perceived how it would work in each of our integration scenarios,” Brewer says. “It was the first time we selected technology that our programmers were so excited to use. Ensemble provides exceptional capabilities for rapid integration and development.”

 

“It was the first time we selected technology that
our programmers were so excited to use.”

- Anita Brewer
Director of IT architecture and innovation
Stanford Hospital

 

Transparent Information Flow with Ensemble

Stanford will use Ensemble as the foundation for its enterprise IT strategy. A key component of this strategy is to use Ensemble as the hub for the free flow of information among multiple applications and data repositories throughout the organization. “We want to pursue a more service-oriented architecture than is currently in place,” Brewer explains, “so it’s easier to extend our data, and be able to exchange information and communicate much more efficiently and rapidly. These objectives drove our search for information exchange and integration software that will ease our transition into the new environment, while mitigating risk.”

The first task for Ensemble is to create the interfaces from legacy departmental systems to a new installation of the Epic Systems Corporation suite of electronic medical record applications. Unlike the technology Ensemble replaced, these new interfaces will not require a team of specialists, each understanding the complexities of the specific languages needed for individual application-toapplication communication. “Ensemble will let us enlarge our focus to information exchange and sharing, instead of just ‘interfacing,’ says Brewer. “It is a new paradigm for us that puts the emphasis on transparent information flow. We’ll be able to automate manual processes, capture data as it flows through the organization, repurpose it, use it in data warehouse applications, and have one central location for its control.”