<p>Our No. 1 priority at Kettering Health Network is patient care. Our dedicated staff of more than 8,000 employees, including 1,200 doctors, is making that possible.</p><p>To provide the highest level of patient care, our staff needs the right access to resources. This involves coordination with our information systems department. We manage the IT systems of more than 60 Kettering facilities. A vital part of our work is maintaining an electronic medical record (EMR) system that gives clinicians immediate access to all the relevant details about patients' health, regardless of which facility they are visiting.</p><p>Keeping our EMR system up and running has had its challenges. When we had a server outage, scheduled or not, we had to transfer a facility manually to a new server. This meant talking to the clinicians on the phone to walk them through rebooting and reconnecting to a new server. This resulted in regular periods without connectivity for physicians.</p><p>Because patient care is our top concern, this downtime was unacceptable. We began to look for a new EMR system to make these transitions easier and maximize uptime for our clinicians. We selected an EMR from Epic Systems to deliver the information to our staff more reliably.</p><p><a href="http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=3293&doc_id=265525&f_src=internetevolution_gnews">Keep reading...</a></p>