The Bassett Healthcare Network is an integrated health care system that provides care and services to people living in an eight county region covering 5,600 square miles in upstate New York. The organization includes six corporately affiliated hospitals, as well as skilled nursing facilities, community and school-based health centers, and health partners in related fields.

Have you ever done something that has never been done before? That was our challenge at Bassett Healthcare Network in Cooperstown, New York.  We identified the opportunity earlier this year at an IBM/Dell shop that has never purchased HP blades before.  Jim VanderMey developed the design and did most of the presales, putting together a configuration that he believed would work well for their Epic/RedHat environment.

We faced product delivery challenges, HP communication challenges, support issues and a technical obstacle just a few days before the commit date on a very tight schedule (under three weeks from product ship to completion of testing).  The team got the resources they needed, addressed the problem and dealt with the difficulties in a way that led to great satisfaction from the customer and a positive review from the Epic technical team.

Cost savings are realized in many ways by running Epic on Linux and Intel-based servers. Server hardware and OS licensing costs are much lower than for UNIX/RISC solutions. The blade solution helps to lower costs even more, by reducing the number of network cards, fans, and power supplies required, along with associated space, power and cooling requirements.