HCA
HCA is the nation's leading provider of healthcare services, composed of locally managed facilities that include 163 hospitals and 105 freestanding surgery centers in 20 states and in the United Kingdom. HCA and its affiliates employ approximately 183,000 people and generates more than $28 billion in annual revenues (in 2008).
HCA houses one of the most advanced and progressive internal technology operations in healthcare today -- HCA Information Technology & Services (IT&S). Computerworld Magazine identified IT&S as “One of the Top 100 Best Places to Work in IT” in 2009.
IT&S’s web division is made up of 8 support managers, 4 designers and 7 front-end developers who focus exclusively on web services. They are responsible for deploying, managing and hosting more than 500 HCA web sites including hospitals, outpatient facilities, physician practices and other medical service organizations.
The Issue
HCA was on a home grown .NET system when they started the review process for a new CMS. The home grown system – while serving the organization well for many years – was interfering with HCA’s ability to react quickly to changes in the health care market. .NET developers were required for even the most basic changes, including modest template changes, permissions changes and the creation of basic reports. The health care market was moving too quickly, and the burden of a system that required such intense developer involvement slowed both the web team and the business.
The Solution
Before investing in any CMS, HCA first had to re-orient the web team and the field structure of those supporting local web needs. A group of 11 was created within the HCA IT&S group, consisting of designers, front end developers (HTML, CSS) and project managers. In the field, a structure of facility-specific and regional staff were given the responsibility to work with IT&S to achieve the proper balance between leveraging corporate assets and programs, and promoting local initiatives.
Once the team was in place, the solution could selected and implementation could begin. After identifying the organization’s core functionality and technical requirements, HCA drafted a list of 50 potential CMS vendors. According to John Scudder, Team Leader of Web Communications, “it became clear that their platform and development efforts were squarely focused on the needs of large organizations." More specific reasons behind the selection include:
- Adavanced multi-tenant capabilities
- Permissioning and Workflow Protocols
- Strong, flexible web development layer
- No Java developer dependence
The Results
To date, HCA has implemented 93 sites off the same instance (8 clustered servers on the Cloud) on their way to implementing 400+. Most sites are integrated with EBSCO content (3rd party provider of medical information for the public), an emergency room wait time app and are rendered to configure to mobile needs.
Deploying 2 to 5 sites/week is possible due to the use of Accelerators – pre-built HCA-specific templates that form a starting point for development.
Tech Specs
- Operating System - Ubuntu LTS
- App Server - Tomcat
- Database - Postgres 8.3
- WebDAV Client - Native Client
- Load Balancer - Apache / mod_jk
- Configuration Management - Puppet
