Case Study: Alice Peck Day Health Systems achieves high availability for electronic medical records with Stratus Technologies

Ensuring High Availability For Critical Electronic Medical Record Software

Alice Peck Day Health Systems is a 25‑bed community hospital serving 20 communities across two states that is expanding clinical services and IT capabilities. As it prepared to deploy a new ambulatory EMR, IT leaders worried their existing virtual infrastructure and off‑campus data center could not guarantee the high availability and automated disaster recovery needed to keep patient records online with limited after‑hours staff—an anxiety reinforced when a construction accident partially severed their communications conduit.

APD implemented Greenway’s ambulatory EMR on Stratus Avance high‑availability software running on industry-standard x86 servers, with a primary Avance platform in the hospital and a secondary site in the data center (nodes can be separated up to 5 km). Avance’s built‑in virtualization and real‑time duplex architecture provided automated failover and near real‑time replication, enabling EMR modules to run continuously. The rollout proceeded on schedule (first module live April 2011; full clinic functionality by year‑end), captured volumes of electronic records that had been paper, required only one minor configuration fix, and positioned APD to extend HA services to other systems.

Alice Peck Day Health Systems

Mike Mahar

Systems/Network Administrator