Valley Medical Center

Giving hospital staff anywhere, anytime communications

Valley Medical Center serves southern King County in Washington state, treating patients for everything from twisted ankles to internal injuries. To operate smoothly, the hospital needs consistent, coordinated communication, with e-mail as the key component. Resolute replaced Valley Medical Center's messaging system with a more robust, scalable solution. The entire project from contract negotiation to full implementation took just six weeks.

The Challenge

Valley Medical Center was pushing the limits of its Lotus cc:Mail messaging system. The hospital had 1,100 people using a system designed to support fewer than 500 users. This stress on the cc:Mail system led to repeated corruption of the e-mail database, causing days of downtime. The hospital needed a more robust, scalable solution that could continue to grow with them. Valley Medical Center also wanted an easy-to-use thin-client application that would allow its roving medical workforce to access the hospital network via a Web browser anywhere and anytime.

The Results

Resolute worked with Valley Medical Center to migrate Novell NetWare and Lotus cc:Mail to Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server. Valley Medical Center picked Resolute from a long list of available providers.

"From the very beginning, Resolute had a thorough plan to help make the design and implementation a success, “says Blenda Shipp, information services manager at Valley Medical Center. "They were well-equipped to deal with every issue that arose."

Resolute worked closely with Valley Medical Center to meet their aggressive timeline. Because the hospital wanted the new system in place as quickly as possible, a phased approach was not an option. Resolute and Valley Medical Center implemented a wholesale migration, shutting down the cc:Mail system and moving all 1,100 accounts at once. This clean switchover meant users could get right to work the next morning with minimum interruption.

"We used our up-front time for trial runs so that the actual migration would happen once and happen right, "says T.J. Merrill, at Resolute. "Valley Medical Center's previous system caused so many frustrations that we wanted to make a clean break and give the business a fresh start."

When the system went live, users were ready. Before Valley Medical Center moved to Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server, Resolute had built a pilot server and used it to provide training to the hospital's staff.

Resolute completed deployment of the Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server solution ahead of schedule, and the transition from the old system was seamless. Valley Medical Center planned to build on this success by using Exchange 2000 technology for videoconferencing and improved document storage and management.