Case Studies

Penang Adventist Hospital

A History of Success

With a history dating back to 1924, Penang Adventist Hospital (PAH) is a successful, private medical institution that operates as a non-profit and charitable organization. It belongs to an international network of more than 500 hospitals and healthcare facilities operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, including the world famous Loma Linda University and Medical Center in California. Among its peers, PAH holds its own as the first private hospital in Northern Malaysia to perform microvascular, coronary bypass, laser heart surgery (TMR) and open-heart surgery.

The hospital is constantly developing its available services. Recent additions to the already established cardiac program are pediatric cardiology and pediatric cardio-thoracic surgery. Plans to develop a neurology and neurosurgical program in the near future are underway.

Business Challenges

To complement the hospital's expanding medical services and to ensure timely delivery of information to staff and patients alike, PAH's IT department embarked on a series of projects to upgrade its Integrated Health Care and ERP systems.

The deployment plans hit a snag when more than 100 existing PCs needed to be replaced due to significantly higher client-side requirements. Not only did this problem put a huge constraint on the tight IT budget, logistics of new PC installation and configuration also threatened to stretch the implementation time-line.

To resolve these issues, the IT department identified server-based computing as a possible solution.

Solution

PAH's IT department spent a month evaluating both Citrix® MetaFrame® and New Moon Canaveral iQ from Propalms®, putting these to work with the new Vesalius Health Information and Great Plains ERP systems on existing PCs running a mix of Windows 9x operating systems. As part of the exercise, PAH's Great Plains internal staff training was conducted using Canaveral iQ as the application management platform.

According to Cornelius Chu, PAH's IT Executive, "We didn't have to install client software on individual workstations or need to worry if these PCs were powerful enough to run Great Plains together with the Health Information Systems and Labview. From a centralized location, we only need to configure these applications on the New Moon application servers. Now we can quickly roll out all these new systems to our users. Going forward, we also expect much less client workstation troubleshooting, which will lessen our support workload but improve the end user's acceptance and satisfaction."

When faced with a decision, PAH chose New Moon Canaveral iQ. Mr. Kelvin Tan, PAH's CIO explained, "We were looking for an affordable solution to enable us to provision our new mission-critical systems. While Citrix® Metaframe® XP may have more features than we need in our environment, it also comes with a higher price tag which is hard to justify. New Moon is the practical choice as its simplicity and cost effectiveness fit with our policy of being self-sufficient. We spend wisely so there will always be enough funds for us to help the community."

Within one week, PAH's IT team had set up four New Moon Canaveral iQ servers to provide end-user access to all new applications, despite the fact the IT team members were new to Windows 2000 Active Directory and networking infrastructure. The evaluation was conveniently phased into production mode, with no major revamping, by simply acquiring the software license for the organization.

The Challenge

To complement the hospital's expanding medical services and to ensure timely delivery of information to staff and patients alike, PAH's IT department embarked on a series of projects to upgrade its Integrated Health Care and ERP systems.

The Solution

Within one week, PAH's IT team had set up four New Moon Canaveral iQ servers to provide end-user access to all new applications, despite the fact the IT team members were new to Windows 2000 Active Directory and networking infrastructure.

The Benefits

Canaveral iQ is the practical choice as its simplicity and cost effectiveness fit with Penang Adventist Hospital's policy of being self-sufficient.

Executive Summary

With a history dating back to 1924, Penang Adventist Hospital (PAH) is a successful, private medical institution that operates as a non-profit and charitable organization. It belongs to an international network of more than 500 hospitals and healthcare facilities operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, including the world famous Loma Linda University and Medical Center in California.

Deployed Applications

Vesalius Health Information Systems from NovaHealth Labview Microsoft Great Plains Microsoft Office applications Internet Explorer & Outlook Express Terminal emulation to IBM RS/6000 Acrobat Reader Other Windows applications

Within one week, PAH .s IT team had set up four Canaveral iQ servers to provide end-user access to all new applications.