1. Project background

Ganzhou is the second large city of Jiangxi Province, it is a deputy central city at a provincial level, it is also known as the Jiangxi South part. Ganzhou is one of the larger prefecture cities in China, it is also the prefecture city in Jiangxi with the largest population and the largest regional area, Ganzhou is a national known revolutionary base. The city’s total population is up to 8.97 million, occupying about one-fifth of the total population of Jiangxi, including 8.3 million resident population and about 7.9 million farmers participating in cooperative medical project.

As early as June 2008, the Health Bureau of Ganzhou City, with its forward visions, boldly proposed to integrate the medical resources throughout the city, so that to build a unified regional medical health information platform for the city, the proposal mainly included the following two points. (1) To integrate all medical resources, strengthen information standardization construction, improve the administrative service ability, avoid repeated investments; (2) Building the health administration, public health, medical service, health applications and drugs supervision, basic drugs supply and demand system and other information systems covering the whole city, realize the sharing and interoperability of the city’s medical information resources.

2. CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

The construction of the regional health information platform in Ganzhou adopted a program with unified planning and distributed implementation, unified data center, unified software interface, unified standard and specifications, unified maintenance and regional integration were achieved. The platform will cover all medical institutions in our city, medical administration agents at all levels, competent departments of governments at all levels and other relevant institutions.

In consideration of the large number of medical institutes and health administrative agents within the 18 counties (city, district) governed by Ganzhou, a unified planning was implemented in a distributed manner, local health bureaus of various regions (county/city/district) should establish information teams to be responsible for the procurement, network acceptance and other relevant work according to the “Hardware procurement program” and the “Network deployment program” provided by Sugon, provide full cooperation to complete the relevant coordination work in the relevant implementation process. After the region platform is completely constructed, it should be uniformly accepted by the city’s health bureau.

Adopting the “cloud computing” manner to establish a health information platform for the grass-roots tertiary medical institutions (based on the health files), as well as the medical institute clinical path decision-making analysis data center and the health data security center (known as the cloud platform), widely spread township hospitals in a way of “service”.

The cloud computing platform is characterized by its dynamics and flexibility, for the large access demand, through load balancing, the platform is able to bear hundreds of thousands, or even millions of network access, the user may, according to the access volume, optimize and reasonably dispatch the background computing resources, ensure the system security through the parallel database cluster, provide online database processing performance.

By using the cloud computer center of Sugon in Wuxi, this project adopted the SAAS mode in the cloud computing to build the platform, so that to reduce costs and improve the application quality.

3. PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

As of today, Ganzhou regional health information platform has covered 9 counties (cities), another 5 counties (cities, districts) are under construction. Time has proved that information construction is obviously essential, the truth has also proved that this platform is completely in compliance with the requirements proposed by the relevant documents issued by the national Ministry of Health, the program has the following features:

      1） Information sharing. Through the cloud computing mode, the health care institutions may jointly built the information sharing space for medical information resources, so that to share the infrastructure formed by the connection of a large quantity of systems, this is conducive to the sharing of medical information between different departments and improve the service quality.

      2） Dynamic expansion. By the application of the cloud environment at Wuxi cloud computing center, the access performance, storage performance, disaster recovery performance of the medical cloud system may be seamlessly expanded and upgraded.

      3） Improving data security and service quality. By using the standard network security measures provided at the cloud center, data theft risk is completely eliminated, medical information data may be implemented with regular local and offsite copy, so that to improve the redundancy of data, by using the colon technology, data on a certain server may be rapidly copied to other servers, so that to really achieve the uninterrupted and safe medical services.

      4） Reducing costs investment. By using the cloud computing, through paying a small amount of rental costs, the primary health care institutions may obtain the services provided by multiple servers at the cloud data center, thus the primary health care institutions may, with lower costs, obtain higher benefits.

      5） Reducing the operation and maintenance costs. Cloud computing mode has no limit to the configurations of customer terminals, technical personnel at the primary health institutions does not need to concern about the hardware and software system upgrades, the daily maintenance of the servers is also provided by the cloud service providers in Wuxi, thus the work intensity is reduced and the work efficiency is improved.