FairCom DB provides fast, accurate, and reliable feature set
When dealing with patient information and test results, access to fast, reliable data is not a luxury but a necessity. It's essential that healthcare facilities have systems in place to ensure the collection of and the high availability of accurate data.
Schuyler House is a global provider of a laboratory information system (LIS) that allows healthcare technicians to perform routine laboratory tasks at higher efficiency and accuracy. This LIS product, SchuyLab, includes an integration of software that provides a variety of options for results delivery, management, overview, and billing process procedures. SchuyLab is used by healthcare organizations of all sizes, ranging from physician offices and associated laboratories to large-scale reference labs to hospitals, as well as veterinary medicine facilities.
One of the reasons SchuyLab works so well is the use of FairCom DB: a multimodel database solution by the FairCom Corporation. FairCom DB allows SchuyLab to give its customers fast, reliable data storage and transfer operations with a wide range of systems: clinical analyzers, electronic medical record systems (EMR), health information systems (HIS), billing systems, and office systems.
The benefits of partnering with FairCom
Schuyler House selected FairCom because of the enhancements offered by FairCom DB, the ease of migration, the business flexibility, and excellent technical support. Below are highlights of the results of the migration:
- Powerful client-server database engine providing complete transaction-controlled data protection
- Vast reduction in support costs for both Schuyler House and its customers
- Elimination of time-consuming index rebuilds for data access interruptions
- Easy-to-deploy encryption guarding HIPAA-protected patient data
- Seamless online data backups without stopping the server
- Flexible licensing and deployment models to create a competitive advantage in this highly advanced market
- Advancement of the Schuyler House Mission to extend access to quality healthcare in developing countries and around the globe
Why FairCom DB? Speed. Flexibility. Reliability.
The strength of the technology, the business flexibility, and, maybe more importantly, the excellent technical support made choosing FairCom DB an easy decision. From a technical perspective, the key database enhancements Schuyler House wanted to include reduced data corruption, online backups, and encryption for ever-stringent regulatory compliance such as HIPAA and EU Directive 95/46/EC.
From the business angle, Schuyler House needed a flexible partner to provide the right model for every licensing scenario. One important goal for the next generation of SchuyLab was to provide better licensing models for its customers. Also important is the Schuyler House mission: Improving healthcare around the globe, which entails providing no-cost solutions to healthcare providers in developing countries. A consequence of this is that no single licensing model works.
FairCom DB provided SchuyLab with the capabilities to meet the requirements it had on its wish list, but another FairCom attribute also stood out. Schuyler House was impressed with the quality of the technical support delivered by FairCom during their migration process. Engineers consistently provided timely and thorough responses to all inquiries and offered suggestions for best practices to improve the overall application.
FairCom works with Schuyler House to maximize performance
Schuyler House and FairCom examined the features needed to bring advanced functionality to SchuyLab. The primary concern was, first and foremost, data integrity. With Schuyler House providing services throughout the world—in both first-world and developing regions—protection against power interruptions is vital. The database server has to provide complete, fast recovery in case of system failure.
By applying the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction protection offered by FairCom DB to all database updates, database integrity is assured even in the worst of disasters. FairCom DB has also significantly reduced the amount of time, money, and resources needed for index rebuilds.
Protecting data at rest is also a pressing concern with today's healthcare security requirements. This frequently involves choices of who ultimately has the master "key" to the data, which can make deployment and future management extremely challenging. FairCom DB effectively addresses this concern by providing SchuyLab with easy-to-deploy data protection that shields the underlying lab data from prying eyes.
The FairCom DB hot backup provides another level of data protection to SchuyLab and its customers by creating clean data backups for safekeeping without the need to stop workflows or the database server. With transaction logs available, complete roll-forward and roll-back capabilities can be employed to restore a database to a precise point in time.
Replacing a database with FairCom DB is simple
It's no secret that replacing a database can be tedious, resource-consuming, and fraught with technical and business risks. That wasn't the case for Schuyler House and FairCom DB.
William Shipley, founder and CEO of Schuyler House, says, "I was able to replace my existing database API calls with FairCom DB in about a weekend. It was an easy one-to-one replacement."
The reason for the easy migration is simple: The FairCom DB record-oriented API is broad and complete, encompassing nearly any data storage and retrieval requirement. Using a few very basic FairCom DB API calls, an application can be up and running in very short order. The process of replacing ISAM database API calls from other database engines with those from FairCom DB is nearly effortless. Because the API replacement was straightforward for Schuyler House, additional attention could be placed on providing advanced transaction control over the data.
About SchuyLab
SchuyLab provides smooth, efficient workflows for laboratories, from the moment orders are placed until doctors have results in hand.
