Data Centre Hosting Environment

The Health Information Solutions Centre (HISC), utilizing Saskatchean Health Information Network's (SHIN) infrastructure, provides a secure hosting environment to support the work of its health sector partners. The central hosting environment reduces the need for increasingly sophisticated information technology (IT) equipment and system specific resource demands on regions.

This centre enables regions to share system solutions hosted centrally in the data centre and is securely accessed by regions over the health information network. This reduces costs to the health sector and enables better and more integrated patient care systems. Systems are built and sized to meet existing capacity and are designed to be scaleable to expand to meet future equipment needs. These systems serve front-line health care professionals across the province.

The data centre also provides website and Webex services for health regions and is currently hosting eight different sites.

As of March 31, 2007, 35 systems are centrally hosted for regions or agencies, some of which include:

• Pharmacy Information System (PIP)
• accessed by health care professionals to assist in identifying potential drug interactions and other prescription management activities
• Saskatchewan Immunization Managment System (SIMS)
• helps public health nurses across Saskatchewan provide immunization services to children
• Chronic Disease Management (CDM) System
• used by participating primary care physicians to better manage the care of chronic disease patients
• Shared Client Index (SCI)
• provides identification services for all patients who received care in a Saskatchewan hospital
• Saskatchewan Surgical Care Network (SSCN)
• used to track surgical waiting times and provide the information necessary to allocate surgical resources and reduce patient wait times
• Integrated Clinical Systems
• support the delivery of front-line services in hospital admitting, health records, pharmacy and laboratory departments as well as home care programs

The data centre continues to expand to increase space, cooling and power needed to accommodate the increased number of servers and applications required to ensure a highly available service. Security and privacy protection are critical in the operation of the health information network and data centre, and it will remain a key focus of ongoing development and enhancement.