The Health Village of the Future: Metro Health Selects InterSystems’ Ensemble for All-Digital Hospital Plan
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Entrepreneurial vision is at the bedrock of the
organizational culture at the Metropolitan Health
Corporation (Metro Health) delivery network in
Grand Rapids, Mich. It’s why they’re building a
new, all-digital hospital that will be the center of a
health village of the future by 2007. It’s why
Metro Health is viewed as an innovator in a healthcare
market where annual revenues of $250M place
them in the middle tier. And, it’s what paved the
way for selecting InterSystems’ Ensemble universal
integration platform as a core system for the new
technology infrastructure now under development.
A visioning committee of local business and community leaders and top Metro Health executives formulated plans for the state-of-the-art health village several years ago. Focused on providing the best possible healthcare experience for four diverse groups—patients, physicians, employees, and the general community—the committee recognized the need for top-tier technology that would enable Metro Health to achieve its all-digital goal.
CIO Bill Lewkowki’s IT strategy is centered around information and application consolidation, simplicity and flexibility in order to provide the Metro Health workforce with easy access to information in multiple forms with virtually no application or infrastructure constraints. A study of InterSystems’ Ensemble universal integration platform revealed software that would enable rapid connectivity and interaction with virtually all of Metro Health’s applications and data repositories. Equally critical, Lewkowski perceived Ensemble as offering a development environment that supports continual growth with new processes and information.
“We were looking for a vendor that is both solid and innovative and an integration platform that does more than just interface…one that will enable other technology products in an innovative way. InterSystems and Ensemble are the right combination.”
--Bill Lewkowski
CIO
Metropolitan Health Corporation
Driving Forward On a New Path
In early 2005, Metro Health replaced the legacy SeeBeyond integration software running at Metropolitan Hospital with Ensemble. Leveraging Ensemble’s rapid development environment, which delivers nearly three times faster development than SeeBeyond, the hospital’s interface specialists project they will complete integration of 25 systems with about 65 different interfaces by year-end. Ensemble’s advanced messaging, which processes messages more than twice as fast as the previous integration platform, combined with an object database, visual trace facilities and self-documentation features are proving key to fast problem identification and resolution and improved communication between business analysts and IT specialists.
“We don’t do technology for technology’s sake. Our strategy is that technology is embedded in the fabric of everything that we do, and that it ultimately enables systems that will deliver benefits to our customer base.”
--Bill Lewkowski
CIO
Metropolitan Health Corporation
Partnering for the Future
The success Metro Health is achieving with its first Ensemble-based initiative is only the first step in a visionary strategy that calls for selecting the right technology partners willing to make a long-term commitment to the new digital hospital and its surrounding village. InterSystems is joining industry leaders that include Epic Systems Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, and Royal Philips Electronics in providing the leading-edge technology Lewkowski and his staff will rely on to support the new health campus. Ensemble’s capabilities for rapid composite application development, business process orchestration and business activity monitoring are expected to play major roles in deploying what Lewkowski and his industry peers believe will be the best and most innovative applications in their market. While he recognizes the all-digital challenge is significant as they move to the new campus, Lewkowski is convinced that Metro Health’s relatively small size encourages the creativity, agility and innovation needed to deliver concrete, measurable success within its community hospital market.