+ Excellent Experiences with PerfectDisk at the Northern Karelia Central Hospital +
Compay Profile
The North Karelia Municipal Health Care and Service Consortium (Finland) forms, together with the area's municipalities and helth care centers, part of a developing Finnish network of social welfare and health care networks.
Regional services are provided using various cooperative models. The municipal consortium provides high qulity health care services and services for the mentally disabled, based on the population's needs.
The North Karelia Municipal Health Care and Social Service Consortium was formed on 1/1/2006. The core of the health care services is formed by the North Karelia Central Hospital in Joensuu, the oldest of its kind in Finland, and by Central Hospital's Kontiolahti Psychiatric Clinic, in the village of Paihola.
The Central Hospital's services are used annually by approximately 58,000 patients, of whom the majority are referred for evaluation by the area's 15 health centers.
In addition, the municipal consortium provides services for disabled clients and their families, at their Honkalampi Center in Liperi.
The municipal consortium has approximately 2,500 employees, of whom, 200 are physicians and 1,300 other health care workers.
Information Management...
The information management function is handled by the municipal consortium's data processing systems, and it constitutes a part of the regional and national health care system's development and maintenance.
The municipal consortium's central computer system environment inculdes systems for accounting and material procurement, patient data systems and personnel mmanagement systems.
The health care record system functions within a micro-network, and it associated with image files and supporting information sources.
The system also includes maintenance of the data processing equipment and the network.
The system utilizes a central computer system, micro-network servers, and workstations - approximately 1,600 units in total.
The information management section employs 22 people, and the annual budget is 3 million euros.
The Impact of Windows Updates on the Workstation Environment...
The workstation environment has been standardized to facilitate maintenance. In connection with the operating systems' data security and other updates, the operating system drives have become fragmented, which causes slowness and various operational disturbances. The situation is the most severe on machines that are used extensively for Windows applications.
The updates are handled through the update server on the internal network. While using PerfectDisk, various improvements were noted as a result of the defragmentation:
The function of various device drivers improved significantly Turning off the booting up machines became faster Applications became faster and less prone to errors When all workstations, in which digital images were filed in an image archive, were defragmented, the users' comments were, " Use is completely different now"; "A significant difference!".
The worst case involved a workstation where the files were in 69,000 fragments, and defragging lasted 48 minutes. The next time the run took 5 minutes, and the third time it took less than a minute, and performance improved.
We also tested defragmentation performance on a few servers, which gave the same results. On a server with 300GB of data, the first run took 27 hours, with subsequent runs requiring correspondingly less time.
