Hong Kong’s Quality HealthCare Adopts IBM Cloud and Analytics

IBM Corp. is building a virtualized infrastructure for a healthcare provider in Hong Kong, Quality HealthCare Medical Services Limited (QHMS).

The project involves the consolidation of more than 100 servers into a cloud environment that hosts QHMS’ mission critical systems that serve over 600 medical centers in Hong Kong and Macau.

The infrastructure will enable QHMS to reduce IT maintenance and disaster recovery costs, ensure production system maintainability and performance, and achieve energy-savings.

By reducing the number of physical servers from over 100 to eight IBM System x servers and centralizing storage, QHMS can reduce IT operational costs by 25 percent and software license and related maintenance costs by 23 percent. The new redundant server infrastructure also includes an automated centralized backup system of IBM System Storage DS3500 Express that enables storage management, backup and recovery.

"We are always looking for ways to further improve the patient experience. Our new cloud allows us to deliver information to our doctors faster and in a more reliable way," said Elaine Chu, Chief Operating Officer of QHMS. "As a result, we will be able to serve our patients more effectively and with higher levels of care. It is very exciting to see how we can make a difference to our patients with the help of technology."

Additionally, the deployment of the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence solution provides financial performance indicator (KPI) and analysis, creating the opportunity to gain more timely business information for better business performance management and smarter decision-making.

QHMS aims to monitor business performance in over 600 medical centers. With IBM Cognos BI, QHMS can build a standardized and centralized information delivery platform that is scalable and flexible, and that enables QHMS to monitor the performance of a range of services running on different systems. QHMS’ management team can now access timely business information with just a few mouse clicks, speeding response times to business needs and patient demands. As a result, QHMS can now focus on analyzing outcomes to drive smarter business decisions instead of spending time compiling manual reports.

"We are pleased to help Quality HealthCare build a smarter computing infrastructure to support its growth strategy," said Savio Ng, Executive, Systems and Technology Group at IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. "By providing a scalable server and storage infrastructure, we believe we can help Quality HealthCare drive greater efficiencies and address its business growth in a dynamic market."

The server consolidation project was delivered through Microware Limited, which provided system analysis and infrastructure design consultation services, including consolidation assessment, network, storage and backup design for the project. The system migration is expected to be completed by the end of 2011.

"IBM and Microware made our cloud implementation much easier than it should have been. From the moment we approached them, they worked closely with us to make our vision for a cloud into a reality," said Gerhard Zielinski, Chief Information Officer of QHMS.