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St. Mary’s Health System
When it comes to care, St. Mary’s Health System in Lewiston, Maine practices an integrated “whole person approach” to meet the needs of patients. The same integrated approach is true when it comes to meeting its information technology needs.
“Our goal is to integrate technology systems across operations,” reports David Stephenson, Manager of St. Mary’s Application Development Services. “When we began planning to upgrade our enterprise payroll applications, we realized that our existing operating system would not support the upgrade; that’s when we called on Norton Lamb & Company for assistance.”
“We’ve worked with NLC for sixteen years, and we trust their guidance,” David explains. “NLC recommended a new IBM ‘Power’ system that would not only support the new payroll functionality, it also offered enhanced performance, greater capacity and the disaster recovery component that we were missing.” St. Mary’s Health System received all these benefits, as well as a lower total cost of ownership than with their previous infrastructure.
The multi-phased project was planned and coordinated by NLC’s technical group and began with the design and installation of new hardware. “Jim Desjardins, NLC’s senior engineer, helped us capture all the data from our existing system prior to the migration process. With the new system installed Joe Hodge was there to load and test some of the new IBM software applications that were required as part of the payroll application upgrade. The migration onto our new hardware went very smoothly and exactly as planned under NLC’s guidance,” reports David. “We experienced significantly faster processing time immediately upon implementation of the new Power system.”
The second phase will be an actual upgrade that will make running the payroll system easier and more intuitive. The final phase includes creating a duplicate system off site that will allow information to be recovered quickly and completely should the need ever arise.
“Not only is the new system faster and allows for total recovery, it’s also much smaller,” concludes David Stephenson. “One small, fully integrated system with significantly more speed and capacity replaced three much larger units. The new IBM Power System takes up a lot less floor space and uses much less energy. It’s really amazing!”