A Single Source
Based in Waukesha, Wis., ProHealth has provided medical services to residents of Waukesha County and surrounding communities for nearly a century. Of course, it’s grown since its inception and now has more than 6,000 employees—including doctors, nurses, care providers and support staff—making it the largest employer in the county.
“When I first started working here 21 years ago, there was just one hospital and a couple of clinics,” notes David Gates, team leader, DBA/systems administrator with ProHealth. “So we’ve grown quite a bit since then, whether through natural expansion or acquisitions, including the recent purchase of a physicians group. We were at around 5,000 employees, but now we’re at about 6,000 as of the beginning of the year.”
ProHealth’s primary locations include Waukesha Memorial Hospital and Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital, as well as 26 ProHealth Care medical associates clinics, several assisted- and independent-living communities and West Wood Health and Fitness Center. Additional services include home healthcare and hospice, a neuroscience center, a regional cancer center, a heart center, a cyberknife center, a level-three newborn intensive-care unit, a center for breast care, a women’s center and an orthopedic center.
ProHealth has a large IT infrastructure that includes many IBM Power* Systems servers. In its Waukesha-based Riverwood Data Center, for example, it has one Power 550, three p5-550Qs, one p5-570, one p5-520, a p5-510 and three System p* 640s (the latter of which are soon to be consolidated to a single Power 550) running AIX. Its remote location, based some “five miles away” from the main data center, according to Gates, includes a pSeries* 650, a Power 550 and an older H80 (scheduled to be replaced by a new Power Systems server). ProHealth also has a host of mission-critical applications, including an ERP suite from Lawson Software (using WebSphere* as an application portal) for payroll, human resources, materials management, payables and general ledger; many GE Healthcare solutions, including Groupcast for billing; Eclipsys’ Sunrise Patient Financials; Kronos Timekeeper; Healthcare Cost Consultants; and Sunquest Laboratory. ProHealth has a database it dubs “Enterprise Data Warehouse,” which, according to Gates, was developed in house.