Wayne, Pa., April 7, 2010 — Main Line Health (MLH), a non-profit health system serving portions of Philadelphia and its western suburbs, has awarded a contract to SunGard Availability Services to provide managed services for its primary data center. SunGard will also deliver remote managed IT services across Main Line Health’s four acute care hospitals – Bryn Mawr, Lankenau, Paoli and Riddle – as well as Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital and 21 other locations.
Main Line Health expects to improve operational efficiencies by having SunGard manage its IT infrastructure, enabling Main Line Health IT staff to focus more fully on its top priority which is delivering clinical data to the point of care.
The contract award resulted from an exhaustive evaluation during which Main Line Health investigated multiple solutions including an internal build and other third-party solution providers. Main Line Health selected SunGard because of its high level of availability and infrastructure uptime. SunGard will host more than 500 Main Line Health servers at one of its Philadelphia-based data centers, supporting delivery of clinical information to Main Line Health’s hospitals and satellite locations. SunGard will also remotely monitor network systems at other Main Line Health facilities.
“SunGard will help us eliminate risks from system outages and enable us to reduce costly capital expenditures needed to build and support our own data center,” said Karen Thomas, vice president and chief information officer at Main Line Health. “Also by having SunGard fully monitor all servers, our IT staff can focus on managing critical applications and data delivery.”
Hosting with SunGard will help ensure that clinical data flows remain uninterrupted to the point of care, which will help Main Line Health maintain its reputation and leadership in the regional healthcare marketplace. SunGard managed hosting will also help increase Main Line Health’s IT flexibility and decrease application rollout times by providing data center infrastructure on demand.
“SunGard’s facility addressed our information availability and application uptime goals with its 2(N+1) design, which has full dual distribution paths and no single point-of-failure. We also wanted to be in an energy-efficient data center to keep operating expenses low and SunGard utilizes several energy best practices to meet these needs,” said Ms. Thomas.
“As hospitals rely more on technology, their data centers require significant upgrades or they risk outages and related downtime which may impact the quality of patient care,” said Tim Cecconi, senior vice president at SunGard Availability Services. “Main Line Health is a leader in utilizing technology to deliver quality patient care and in taking steps to address the availability requirements of its hospitals.”
