CHRISTUS Health Chooses Compuware for EHR Application Performance

Compuware Corporation, a technology performance company, today announced that CHRISTUS Health, a large Catholic health system in Irving, TX, has selected the Compuware Gomez^® Platform to improve the performance and availability of its clinical electronic health records (EHR) systems, and also helping the health system proactively identify and resolve performance issues before they have an effect on patient care or cause unexpected system downtime, according to a company press release.

The press release notes that CHRISTUS Health is a “60-hospital health system with nearly 350 medical facilities and services located across the southern U.S. and Mexico and more than $4 billion in assets,” treating over two million patients a year.

The health system’s IT team supports about 30,000 users (doctors, clinicians, all medical personnel) across the CHRISTUS health system, each using clinical EHR systems daily with the expectation that they will be and running 24/7, “outage-free to ensure patients receive the best quality of care,” according to the press release.

The CHRISTUS Health IT team came to Compuware, the press release reports, because it “needed visibility into performance issues before they impact the quality of care doctors and clinicians deliver to patients.” CHRISTUS Health chose the Gomez^® solution for application performance management (APM).

"Our physicians and clinicians expect our EHR systems to be available and working, problem-free, 24/7. If our systems are down, patient care can suffer, and that's unacceptable," said George Conklin, senior vice president and CIO at CHRISTUS Health, in the press release. "With the Gomez solution, now we have complete visibility into end-user experience and can measure end-to-end system performance from the clinician's perspective. Now my team has a better picture into application performance and can proactively find and fix problems before clinicians and patients are impacted."

The Gomez solution helped the health system to identify a problem with application delays that CHRISTUS Health had been experiencing for some time, according to the press release.

"Normally, we would have spent hours, if not days trying to find the problem," said Conklin in the press release. "But with the Gomez solution, the Compuware APM team was able to immediately find and isolate the problem, enabling my IT team to quickly fix it, saving us time and money. This pretty much sealed the deal for us in selecting Compuware."

"Poor application performance has a significant effect on clinician adoption and how patient care is delivered, so it's critical that hospitals have high-performing, outage-free systems," said Larry Angeli, Vice President of Healthcare Solutions at Compuware Corporation. "With the Gomez solution in place, CHRISTUS Health can quickly pinpoint performance issues and fix them before the clinical staff is even aware of it. This instills greater confidence in IT and improves clinician productivity and satisfaction with EHR systems."

For best ehr application performance, itelework.com advises all health systems choosing and using ehrs to measure how quickly you get to the proposed site, how easy it is to maneuver around it, demo the product yourself and don’t skimp on the hardware you’ll use with the system.

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