Park Place International
Leveraging HP Technology to Provide Expert Sustainable Solutions for Healthcare IT and MEDITECH

The healthcare industry of today is driven by a complex and conflicting set of priorities around technology requirements for improving the clinical practice. “While the Affordable Care Act provides funding for enhancing the use of electronic health records and healthcare information systems by hospitals as well as physicians, there are also mandates like HIPAA and HITECH Act which demand a base level of security, privacy, and electronic security,”says James Fitzgerald, Executive Vice-President, Park Place International. Founded in 1991 in Marlborough, MA, Park Place International is committed to tackling these challenges and providing expert solutions for MEDITECH and healthcare enterprises.

Partnering with HP, the company develops reference architectures and best practice solutions to the healthcare vertical. “We work in a very collaborative way with HP; they have a team that addresses the healthcare space and also a focused group of people that specifically supports MEDITECH, with whom we are deeply partnered,” says Fitzgerald. In effect, HP and Park Place’s MEDITECH team work together to define solutions that strengthen the performance of the healthcare information systems, making it more resilient and sustainable. The most important thing that Park Place brings to the table is the expertise that comes from being laser focused on the healthcare, by balancing the design requirements of hospitals running the MEDITECH software with other enterprise requirements like PACS, and then continuously evolving best practices to implement HP solutions for hospitals and physicians.

The most important thing that Park Place brings to the table is the expertise that comes from being laser focused on healthcare

Park Place offers on-site private cloud solutions and OpSusCloud Services to enable customers to build, buy, or create a hybrid solution to meet individualized needs and budgets. OpSus Live is a service optimized to support the entire spectrum of MEDITECH and related applications. OpSus Recover is designed to be complimentary to customers who have built solid virtualized onsite data centers. Many customers prefer an in-the-cloud option for recovery in case they are threatened by either a geographic, weather-based crisis or by an act of sabotage or terrorism. “We offer cloud-based recovery solutions with a range of RPO/RTO’s from 12 hours down to the last committed system write,” notes Fitzgerald.

While disaster recovery is necessary in extreme circumstances, hospitals are also concerned with maintaining high availability of clinical systems with swift operational recovery in the unlikely event of technology failures or software problems like interface errors. Park Place created an environment like this using HP 3Par Storage and HP Blade Servers for Johnson Memorial Hospital in Indiana and leveraging two separate data centers, adding infrastructure to the locations that already existed. The company implemented a design in which the two data centers are constantly mirroring data to each other using HP technology. This positions Johnson Memorial to respond to a disaster or an operational adverse event with minimal or no data loss. The hospital could restore a system that has failed, irrespective of whether it’s the external or internal factors that caused the outage.

Looking forward, Park Place hopes to build on their emerging strength in Hybrid Cloud. The company strongly believes in innovation of IT in the healthcare sector. “IT co-generation in the cloud is becoming an operational norm,” remarks Fitzgerald. “You might visit a hospital sometime in the next 18 months and enjoy a café latte while your genome is being analyzed by an array of supercomputers—part of the data being processed locally in the hospital’s private cloud data center and part decoded in the cloud,” Fitzgerald smiles.