Solutions on System z

Health plans and provider organizations around the world are making the shift from paper to electronic medical records to help reduce medical errors, improve quality of care, and process claims more quickly. Many providers are increasing investments in medical records and information technology to gain greater efficiencies and to help contain costs. Organizations are replacing or upgrading core business and clinical information systems while transforming the associated processes. To ensure consumers can make more informed choices for their own healthcare, some governments and insurers are even posting quality ratings on hospitals and physicians. Overall, the healthcare industry is seeking tools that can improve information integration and reduce the error rate of claims processing.

System z is designed to minimize system downtime, enabling healthcare organizations to provide physician access to information anytime, anywhere and health benefits to be accurately determined at the time of treatment. System z provides the ability to direct processing capacity to a specific application based on needs. Mainframe technology helps provide an efficient platform to support healthcare organizations' peak utilization requirements. The new System z10 Enterprise Class (z10 EC) delivers additional availability enhancements to keep critical applications up and running 24x7.

The System z mainframe provides an integrated encryption infrastructure that protects sensitive and confidential data over the Internet, in data bases, through portals, and even on tape, helping provider and payer organizations to protect sensitive information and meet privacy objectives. The z10 EC provides superior performance for encryption with an integrated cryptographic accelerator built into the hardware.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers the promise of improved agility and enhanced flexibility, enabling payers and provider organizations to drive greater internal process efficiency and to respond quickly to new application and user requirements. SOA enables the aggregation of data from multiple systems, providing comprehensive customer information, from payers to hospitals to physicians to patients. System z provides a secure, resilient and flexible platform to serve as the hub for an extensive SOA infrastructure which will continue to expand over time.

System z virtualization can help organizations reduce the total cost of ownership by enabling the consolidation of smaller distributed servers onto a mainframe. The z10 EC delivers significantly lower cost of ownership plus new levels of energy efficiency. With increased capacity, the z10 EC virtualization capabilities can help support hundreds or thousands of virtual servers in a single footprint which is increasingly important in today's healthcare ecosystem which can span multiple countries for one healthcare organization.

Below are white papers, analyst studies, success stories and more to help you understand how System z can help healthcare organizations control costs, increase efficiency and flexibility, and improve security and resilience.