Patient Data is Protected with Pervasive DataExchange
"Our customers provide healthcare to the citizens of our community. The information they collect and manage is, in the most fundamental sense, mission-critical. Pervasive DataExchange™ helps safeguard this critical patient health information, improving their ability to serve patients."
Lawrence Royle, CEO, Randt Systems
About CCAC Hamilton
The Ontario, Canada Community Care Access Center (CCAC) program was created to provide high-quality, consumer-focused personal support and healthcare services. The centers provide eligible clients with a broad range of services, including case management, nutrition and dietetics, personal support, nursing and counseling. These services, conducted in the recipients' homes, are directed at minimizing hospital admissions, decreasing length of hospital stays, and minimizing or delaying admission to long-term care facilities. The CCAC model is supported by research, which indicates that recipients of these types of services recover from illness more quickly than those treated in traditional healthcare surroundings.
Providing home-based healthcare in a community setting is a complex task. To manage the network of healthcare providers, the centers in the cities of Halton, Hamilton and Lindsay each run a Randt Systems case management application. This key application, CMIS, maintains client lists, schedules patient visits, records vital statistics and manages administrative items. Since the centers are low-overhead organizations with little IT support, Randt Systems based the application on the Pervasive.SQL™ database from Pervasive Software®. Pervasive.SQL provides the centers with high performance and low total cost of ownership, an ideal combination in environments like theirs.
Business Challenge
The centers take their responsibility to safeguard patient data very seriously. All centers perform nightly tape backups. These back up the Pervasive.SQL databases and other application assets. However, tape backup presents two challenges for organizations like the CCACs:
- Tape backup data is not fresh. Backups from the night before leave the current day's data exposed: data since the last backup will be lost in the event of failure. In healthcare settings such as these, this exposure is not tolerable.
- Tape backup data is not fresh. Backups from the night before leave the current day's data exposed: data since the last backup will be lost in the event of failure. In healthcare settings such as these, this exposure is not tolerable.
As low-overhead healthcare provider organizations, the centers needed a technology to maintain fresher backups with less manual effort. Further, the technology must be able to support their load requirements (up to 130 users) without requiring additional hardware.
Pervasive DataExchange Solution
Under Randt Systems' guidance, the centers turned to Pervasive Software for a data replication solution. The answer was Pervasive DataExchange.
DataExchange is the Pervasive database replication product, featuring sophisticated technology to keep two or more databases synchronized. Operating at the database level, DataExchange captures database changes on the primary server and applies them to the backup server. This allows DataExchange to avoid errors common to disk-based replication tools, like replicating corrupt data or spreading viruses.
In the CCAC environment, DataExchange replicates data from the production CMIS databases to warm standby servers. The systems replicate data from the primary to the backup every 5 minutes, ensuring maximum data protection. The standby servers are currently kept onsite, providing failover protection. Eventually, these servers will be moved to offsite locations, providing enhanced protection in the case of site-wide disasters.
Bottom Line
The Community Care Access Centers in Halton, Hamilton and Lindsay are all satisfied Pervasive customers. Each was able to increase the safety and security of their data without adding administrative burden. The replication based solution is superior to increasing the frequency of tape backups. Further, recovery in the event of failure is faster than having to retrieve and mount backup tapes. In fact, CCAC Hamilton is planning to deploy another server powered by Pervasive DataExchange for offline reporting use.
Says Laurence Royal, CEO of Randt Systems, "Pervasive.SQL and Pervasive DataExchange have been excellent products for my customers. The database runs quickly and reliably. It is the perfect database for an embedded application like ours. Further, DataExchange and its replication capability enhances data security without increasing our administrative load. They form, in my opinion, an excellent pair."
About Pervasive Software®
Pervasive Software is a leading global data management company powering the success of application developers by providing solutions that deliver the industry's best combination of performance, reliability and low administration costs. Pervasive's strength is evidenced by the size and diversity of its customer base, serving tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of thousands of end-users in nearly every vertical market around the world. Founded in 1994, Pervasive sells its products into more than 150 countries and is based in Austin, Texas, with offices in Europe.
For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.
