SOLUTION PROVIDER

A Vision Shared

Global Care Solutions identified in 1997 that Amalga PACS includes a highly scalable a single integrated Total Hospital Information document management system designed to System (THIS) is what clinicians and admin- handle more than just the order forms in a istrators need for their facilities. This would radiology department; it is designed to handle powerful. It is based on a three-tier architec- provide users with optimal workflow and relia- the entire medical records department of the ture utilizing the Microsoft .NET bility. Since those early days, a totally integrat- largest facilities in the world. The Amalga Framework. This enables desktop PCs, ed, single database solution that serves the PACS also integrates all picture data such as Tablet PCs, and other Microsoft-Windows- entire facility’s needs was born: GCS Hospital pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology, and compatible devices to communicate seam- 2000 Suite and the GCS Amalga PACS/RIS. other images in the facility. lessly with the data center through middle- tier servers. This data center consists of a A Total Hospital Enterprise Purchase single database server solution that can be Information System Hospital information systems selection is an clustered or replicated for ultimate reliabili- Hospital 2000 and the Amalga PACS/RIS enterprise decision. It involves all the clinical ty. It is also very cost-effective and designed are the results of careful design and intense staff, but should also include all administra- to stay that way. collaboration with doctors, radiologists, phar- tive and back-office users as well. Why inte- The Hospital 2000 architecture is specifi- macists, laboratory technicians, nurses, and grate all departments together in one system? cally designed for extremely high uptime rat- departmental specialists to identify and meet Everyone in a hospital works together as a ings – keeping one database server running the needs of health care professionals. As a team and information needs to be freely reliably is much easier than running multiple result of careful design and planning, Global available from one discipline to another. systems. It is also much easier to back up and Care Solutions software can enhance the effi- Breaking down the departmental walls replicate a single server to a disaster recovery ciency of health care rendered to patients and enables workflows that have only been imag- site. Cost-effective RAID solutions are widely the productivity of all hospital departments. ined. With an enterprise system, the hospital available, easy to back up or replicate, and The Hospital 2000 solution includes: gets more value for money and the budget their fault tolerance ensures business continu- Registration, Clinic Systems, CPOE, Ward, can be spread across more departments. ity even during the worst disaster situations. Emergency Department, Laboratory, System uptime is assured. The facilities reputa- Radiology (RIS), Picture Archiving and Keep It Simple tion and patient lives depend on it. Communication System (PACS), Clinical Hospital 2000 and Amalga PACS are built on A typical 500-bed tertiary care facility Image Management, Pharmacy, Operating a simple guiding principle: The less moving would run all applications in a single Dell Theatre, ER, Enterprise Appointments, Billing parts and third-party vendor products, the 6650 server containing a four-processor Systems, Patient Accounting, Claims Manage- higher the chance of success. To this end, the Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz CPU with 16 GB of ment, Purchasing, Inventory, Accounts system is based on familiar technologies such RAM. Storage is simple as well. It is based Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, as Microsoft® Windows® 2003, Microsoft® on Dell/EMC CX500/700 storage systems. Asset Management, Human Resources, SQL Server™ 2000, and desktops, servers, It is simple, cost-effective, and uses only Rostering/Time and Attendance, and Payroll. and storage. Hospital 2000 and Amalga PACS eight square feet of floor space on the com- At Global Care Solutions, research and also integrates with existing systems via our puter room floor. In fact, this size hardware development is an ongoing process; the soft- built-in HL7 engine. All GCS products sup- configuration has experienced 1.8 billion ware evolves from direct feedback of care- port HL7, CCOW, IHE, DICOM and many transactions per year with the GCS Hospital givers and administrators. other integration standards. We know that 2000 suite of products using Microsoft SQL some systems must be integrated with the Server 2000, at 99.999 percent uptime. In A PACS in the THIS Hospital 2000 solution, so we embrace the addition, data is never purged, moved, The GCS Amalga PACS is part of the larger standards while we enable facilities to migrate archived, or deleted. product suite of Hospital 2000. It can also be toward a single solution. The Global Care Solutions Hospital used as a PACS/RIS and integrated into your 2000 single-server solution is so cost-effec- existing hospital information system (HIS). Architecture – tive that eventual replacement can be justi- The Amalga PACS inherits functionality The Heart of the System fied every three to five years, giving the from the departmental modules to deliver an The architecture of Hospital 2000 and facility the fastest solutions and keeping enterprisewide solution. For example, the Amalga PACS is designed to be simple and them well within budget.

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Many system administrators worry about nonproprietary storage techniques are used to be an aid to the radiologist and has reliability or potential disasters in single in the archive, allowing simplified backups improved patient safety. server solutions. This is exactly the point: It and data migration. PACS systems contain Today, there are several computer-aided is easier to cluster, backup, and/or replicate terabytes of storage, so ensuring the archive detection solutions on the market, but they a single system than multiple systems. The can be migrated in the future will certainly are based on proprietary hardware and are facility benefits as follows: pay dividends. generally expensive. GCS has enabled the •A production system based on a single GCS Amalga PACS workstation software server/storage solution leaves enough Web Delivery – so it is Adobe Photoshop® image process- budget for a cost-effective backup data The Key to Being Filmless ing plug-in compatible encouraging the center. This option would not be afford- The GCS Amalga PACS Web client is now radiology community to write their own able in the “best-of-breed” multiple data- built on Microsoft .NET Framework. No- computer-aided detection algorithms and base architectures, with multiple operat- touch deployment makes it painless for soft- simply install them on the GCS Amalga ing systems and databases; ware installation. PACS. We firmly believe that computer- •A single server/database solution is easier Web image delivery is essential to aided detection should be available to to backup and restore; the success of any enterprise PACS. With everyone everywhere. •Service contracts and maintenance are the GCS Amalga PACS, a Web client is simpler, due to having to deal with fewer “built in” to the PACS server architecture, Software Licensing Made Simple vendors – finger-pointing is reduced; enabling seamless and real-time image All licenses from Global Care Solutions are • The facility’s computer department also delivery. GCS Amalga PACS supports a for unlimited users and unlimited worksta- benefits, as it is much easier to train the choice of data compression formats and tions to enable you to expand without penal- administrators how to manage a single technologies such as JPEG 2000 (wavelets) ties. When the facility expands, buy more system; and and adaptive binary optimization. Security, PCs and start using the system with no extra • Clinical users and hospital management encryption, and all the necessary technolo- license fees from Global Care Solutions. – the data is in one server with no dupli- gies ensure patient data privacy and HIPPA cation or possibility of mismatch. All compliance. Designed to Be Cost-Effective data is real-time, so decisions can be The entire range of Global Care Solutions made faster. GCS Amalga PACS – No Hidden Options products are designed to be cost-effective. The GCS Amalga PACS is as a complete One of the most difficult systems for a The GCS Amalga PACS shares this com- solution where all the features are “built facility to cost justify is a PACS, as they mon systems architecture and allows all in,” not “bolted on.” The integrated, seam- are a major capital-intensive purchase. It images to be stored online using RAID stor- less design of all GCS products makes the does not have to be that way, as the price of age. This highly scalable design provides Amalga PACS a complete solution. Built- technology declines and performance rapid retrieval of both today’s and historical in features include: MPR/MIP, CD cre- improves on an almost daily basis. Take, for studies. With online storage systems that ation, DICOM printing, frame grabbing, example, a hypothetical hospital with operate at 160 MB per second, even the film scanning, CAD enabled, Adobe 100,000 studies per year and compare the largest multi-slide CT study is no problem. Photoshop® image processing plug-in cost of staying with film versus going digi- All study retrievals – current and priors – compatible, teaching folders, and MIRC tal, taking into consideration film, chemi- are very fast. compliant. The GCS simple philosophy of cals, and storage only, versus the fully Technology changes rapidly – planning “built in” ensures that facilities get all of loaded costs of the GCS Amalga PACS. for it will make system selection easier. the features to operate their department as The calculation for the GCS Amalga PACS Today we know current archive media will they envisioned. includes the cost of servers, storage for 10 become obsolete during the useful life of years of online studies, six diagnostic work- your new PACS. The music CD made Computer-Aided Detection stations based on Barco Coronis LCD tech- vinyl records obsolete quite quickly; even Computer-aided detection will become an nology, replacement of all workstations in CDs are predicted to vanish in the next indispensable diagnostic tool in the future. year six (due to obsolescence), GCS Amalga five years due to online music. The mes- A typical example of computer-aided PACS software, and a 10-year maintenance sage is clear – plan now for obsolescence detection is in the mammography field. contract. This calculation also assumes a and eventual change. GCS have created The software looks for micro-calcifications film reduction rate of 0 percent in the first tools to painlessly move from the current and irregularly shaped masses with specific year, 50 percent in the second year, and 75 Amalga PACS archive to future media characteristics, and performs a “second percent for the remaining years. The ROI (with no downtime). Open standards and read” for the radiologist. This has proven takes less than 18 months, and the 10-year

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Global Care Solutions provides software exclu- sively for the health care industry. GCS has two main products: Hospital 2000 enterprise HIS and the Amalga PACS/RIS.

Patrick Downing Chief Executive Officer

Etienne Bernath Chief Financial Officer

Dickon Smart-Gill Figure 1 Hospital 2000 Example Screens Chief Operating Officer Top: The Hospital 2000 PACS Web Client and EMR Scanned Document Viewer Bottom: EMR Cumulative Test Results and OLAP Data Mining Mark Marples Chief Technology Officer savings is over $2.2 million. This does not take Finalist MS-HUG Acute Care: Clinical/ into account any savings on full-time employ- Patient Information System – Global Care Global Care Solutions ees and improved patient care, so the ROI can Solution was named finalist in the Microsoft North America be faster. Industry Solution Awards for Healthcare in the 2111 Lake Ave. Clinical/Patient Information category for the Baltimore, MD 21218 Global Care Solutions Is Hospital 2000 system. The awards recognized Phone 877.322.4689 Internationally Recognized independent health care software vendors www.hospital2000.com The industry analysts and users have rewarded worldwide. Europe Global Care Solutions for our hard work with Business Solution of the Year – In October 25 Shouldham St. industry awards. Global Care Solutions have 2000, Microsoft Corp. selected Global Care London, W1H 5FG won: Solutions’ Hospital 2000 Hospital Information Best Data Management Award – Global System for the Microsoft Fusion 2000 Business Asia Pacific Care Solutions won the “Data Management Solution of the Year award. Microsoft Asia BH Tower – 19th Floor 33 Sukhumvit Soi 3 Solution of the Year” category at the 2003 Fusion is Asia’s premier partner event of the Bangkok 10110 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in year and the largest gathering of valued busi- New Orleans, La. The GCS Amalga PACS ness partners in Asia. Business Contact solution was one of more than 1,000 entries Ignacio Diaz from around the world considered for awards The Future Marketing Director in 16 different categories. Global Care Solutions will continue to pio- Phone +66 2253 8835 MS-HUG Acute Care: Best Acute/Clinical neer innovative, cost-effective, scalable, and [email protected] Patient Care System – In February 2003, very reliable health care solutions based on Global Care Solutions Amalga PACS/RIS won Microsoft and Intel platforms. We are com- the Acute Care Clinical/Patient Information mitted to enabling the enterprise through Systems category. The award was presented at enterprise THIS and PACS solutions. Take HIMMS 2003 in San Diego, Calif. advantage of our passion. ■

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