Hospital de Clínicas Caracas in Venezuela trusts SupraBT to help them deliver the quality service their customers deserve through database improvements
Caracas, Venezuela
April, 2014
With the main purpose of offering a more efficient and reliable service to its customers, Hospital de Clínicas Caracas has entrusted SupraBT with providing the most sophisticated high availability database solution available in the market; Oracle Database Real Application Clusters. Backed by this new platform, the hospital’s I.T. department has effectively set the technological bar to new heights in order to assume new challenges.
Founded in Venezuela in 1985, Hospital de Clínicas Caracas currently employs over 1,400 people among administrative, medical, nursing, maintenance and other personnel. Currently the main 8 story building offers 147 consulting rooms, 12 operating rooms and various offices. This busy Caracas hospital cares for 1,250 hospitalized patients, 1,375 emergencies (adult and pediatric), 1,084 surgical procedures and 84 births on a monthly basis.
I.T. Manager, Carol Duque, contacted SupraBT to explain the hospital’s strategic technology upgrade plan involving the investment in a new clinical core system to centralize operations and thus offer a better service to their customers while gaining superior operative, tactical and strategic control.
One of the most important technological components in which almost all enterprise applications rely on is the database management system (DBMS). It’s importance comes from having to guarantee access and availability of the data applications consume directly affecting their speed, business continuity, interoperability, flexibility and concurrence capabilities.
What was Hospital de Clínicas Caracas looking for?
- Reducing application response time
- A new platform that allowed for planned downtime for database administrative tasks guaranteeing business continuity
- A DBMS that did not require a large initial investment that could easily scale out when required
- A DBMS with a proven track record of high availability that can handle administrative tasks (i.e. version upgrading, security patching) while providing 24x7x365 service
- A solution requiring less number of steps to manage the DBMS
- Centralize information in a robust data base system with high availability
Giuseppe Rosellino, I.T. Area Chief, explains that applications were slow running and on occasion suffered from “freezing”, which required investing long work hours to resolve as well as downtime that affected business continuity and delayed highly demanded tasks.
After extensive planning between the I.T. department and SupraBT, the conclusion was that the only solution that met and exceeded all aforementioned challenges was the Oracle Database RAC (Real Application Clusters) in it’s standard edition. Offering a unique active-active architecture, the solution allows for the deployment of the database in a cluster, a group of servers acting as one which have the benefit of: failure tolerance, higher performance and scalability without requiring application changes. This configuration also allows for high availability and business continuity all in an easy to administrate package, ideal for 24×7 operations.
SupraBT was in charge of the implementation and engaged with the hospital in the following activities:
- Database Consulting Services: specialized Oracle technical support
- Database Cluster: 2 node cluster architecture (active-active) for high availability
What does Hospital de Clínicas Caracas say today?
Response time improvements, explains Giuseppe Rosellino, have had a notorious impact on processes, both during queries as in data updates, allowing the speed increase of response times considerably. An example of the improvement can be observed in the applications used by the Human Resources Department, particularly the payroll office which assumes the responsibility of employee payments and could take up to 2 hours just to generate the payroll. With the new Oracle RAC platform, these times have improved up to 250%, diminishing response times to 5 minutes on average.
