Earthquake law pushes hospitals to spend big on IT

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http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/recovery/story/0,10801,90226,00.html

By Bob Brewin and Patrick Thibodeau
FEBRUARY 16, 2004

A California law that mandates earthquake-proof hospitals is sparking
massive investments in IT infrastructure upgrades by health care
companies in the state, starting with the hardening of data centers
but also including the deployment of faster networks, wireless systems
and other new technologies.

For example, Sacramento-based Sutter Health expects to spend the
better part of $1 billion on technology upgrades at its 26 hospitals
over the next 10 years as a result of the law, CIO John Hummel said
last week. As the not-for-profit company rebuilds some of its
facilities to comply with the law, it plans to invest in new bandwidth
and storage capabilities in an effort to meet processing demands well
into the future, he said.

Mark Zielanzinski, CIO at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, said
his facility is building a data center and demolishing its existing
one as part of an overhaul of its entire campus to meet the law's
requirements. The new data center is due to be fully operational by
March 2005.

In addition, the data center reconstruction prompted a server
consolidation and upgrade project, Zielanzinski said. El Camino
Hospital is consolidating more than 150 smaller servers onto two
Unisys Corp. ES 7000 systems, each of which can support up to 32 Intel
processors. A matching set of servers is being installed at a new
disaster recovery site 120 miles away, in more geologically stable
Sacramento, he added.

The law, known as the California Facilities Seismic Safety Act, was
passed in 1994 after the Northridge earthquake struck north of Los
Angeles and caused $3 billion in damage to 23 hospitals. But the
measure is just now becoming an urgent matter for many health care
companies, which must comply by 2008 -- or 2013 if extensions are
granted.

The California HealthCare Association estimates that it will cost $24
billion to earthquake-proof or rebuild a total of about 2,700 hospital
buildings throughout the state. IT costs could account for $2.4
billion to $3.6 billion of that, said Gerard Nussbaum, a consultant at
Kurt Salmon Associates Inc. in Atlanta.

The staggering costs played a big role in convincing Sacramento-based
Tenet Healthcare Corp. to seek buyers for 19 of its 36 California
hospitals. Tenet last month said it would cost $1.6 billion to bring
the facilities being divested into compliance with the state's seismic
standards.

But for all the expenses it's generating, the earthquake law gives
health care firms an opportunity to upgrade their IT systems, says
Nussbaum and CIOs such as Sutter Health's Hummel. It provides an
impetus for hospitals to develop IT installations that are "truly 21st
century," Nussbaum said.

Sutter Health has already replaced five of its 26 hospitals and needs
to completely rebuild six more. Hummel said the company is looking to
take full advantage of the situation on the IT side. For example, his
plan calls for storage capacity to grow at a rate of 12TB to 15TB per
year to support digital imaging and other data-intensive medical
systems.

Sutter also plans to run fiber-optic circuits to every floor of the
new hospitals to support the exchange of digital images, as well as
new systems such as electronic medical records and computerized
physician order entry. In addition, it's building in wireless systems
to provide doctors and nurses with access to data from anywhere inside
a hospital, Hummel said.

Joy Grosser, CIO at the University of California, Irvine Medical
Center, agreed that the earthquake law is creating opportunities to
plan from scratch IT infrastructures designed to support new systems.  
Grosser said that in her case, that includes deploying new wireless
networks to accommodate devices such as tablet PCs as well as
broadband networks to support the increasingly high-tech systems in
operating rooms.

The mandate has required extensive retrofitting and upgrading of the
technology infrastructure at White Memorial Medical Center in Los
Angeles, said Brian Smolskis, the facility's IT director. His staff is
installing new fiber-optic cabling, backup power supplies and
fire-suppression systems in the hospital's data center and rebracing
its server racks, Smolskis said, adding that none of the changes is a
simple task.

 

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