Healthcare Software Solutions (HSS)
Healthcare Software Systems (HSS) are the UK’s leading provider of RIS (Radiology Information Systems) to public healthcare organisations, health trusts, hospitals and clinics.
HSS has been designing, implementing and supporting hospital-based information systems for over 25 years and is the largest independent RIS provider in the UK, with installations at over 175 NHS and private-units nationwide.
With the omnipresent need to manage the cost of providing critical systems to their clients, HSS decided to migrate their patient record database from Oracle to PostgreSQL. This was by no means a decision made lightly, as the critical nature of the patient record system (that 64 UK healthcare trusts rely on) could not be jeopardised in any way – whether that be loss of access or reduced performance.
After careful evaluation, the team – lead by Craig Wilson, Technical Services Manager – made the decision to migrate. With spiralling licence fees from Oracle, the potential upside in terms of cost savings was easy to appreciate. HSS just needed to secure the services of an organisation that understood PostgreSQL inside out and could provide access to leading experts.
With up to 1000 concurrent users accessing the data, the migration had to be smooth and seamless to the healthcare professionals who rely on this key system.
2ndQuadrant were delighted to initially provide consultancy services to HSS, thus ensuring a successful migration to PostgreSQL on time and without any issues. This initial engagement not only provided HSS with the evidence of skills and expertise that 2ndQuadrant could provide, it also made it an obvious decision for HSS to award 2ndQuadrant the contract for 24/7 Production Support.
“The support from 2ndQuadrant has been really good, dealing with people who are keen to help us quickly and really know their stuff.”
Craig Wilson, Technical Services Manager
HSS now benefits from Gold Production Support, providing 24/7 access to experts and giving the company the reassurance that if bugs appear in the PostgreSQL database, help is at hand quickly and efficiently. Craig’s team have benefitted from their support contract a number of times and as Craig comments, “The support from 2ndQuadrant has been really good, dealing with people who are keen to help us quickly and really know their stuff.”
The migration to PostgreSQL went well and as Chris remarks:
“Our migration has been relatively smooth and PostgreSQL performs really well. The support we now get is impressive compared to what we’d previously experienced from Oracle as it could take up to 3 days for an appropriate response.
HSS has also protects its data with Barman, an open source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL. Barman allows Craig and his team to perform remote backups of multiple servers and help them during the recovery phase.
With something as sensitive as patient data, the basic foundations of a robust database management system are critical. Like many organisations, HSS have put their faith in the world’s most advanced open source database, releasing them from costly vendor lock-inand are now experiencing far more flexibility, superior support and service, and significantly reduced ongoing costs.
Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open-source administration tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation to perform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase.
Visit pgbarman.org for more information.
2ndQuadrant Services Provided:
- Training
- Consultancy
- Production Support
About 2ndQuadrant
2ndQuadrant provides PostgreSQL solutions for the Enterprise. Our support engineers have over 100 years of combined code contributions to the PostgreSQL project, making us the only company to contribute enterprise features to all of the last 13 releases.
This is paired with 17+ years of hands-on experience through client engagements and allows us to integrate customized solutions with our customers – making 2ndQuadrant the Gold Standard for PostgreSQL products & services.
