Situation:

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Health System runs 31 merged and affiliated hospitals in western Pennsylvania with outreach programs in 50 others. Of its 35,000 employees (a number that makes it the region's largest employer), about 750 work in information services, helping to maintain UPMC Health System's nearly 350 Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers. Among the IT staff is LAN Administrator Sharon Masters, who specializes in documentation and asset management.

Problem:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better know as HIPAA, has made the healthcare IT business really take off according to Masters. For compliance, an organization must prove it is keeping all such records portable and private and that the infrastructures through which they travel and on which they reside are secure and can be rebuilt in the event of a disaster. This requires the ability to monitor and document network devices continuously. Few organizations can spare the resources necessary to maintain such information on an ongoing basis. Not doing so, however, can result in massive fines and lost revenue due to loss of patient confidence.

Solution:

The UPMC Health System began using Ecora's Configuration Auditor to get a better sense of what was happening in its infrastructure as it began to move towards HIPAA compliance. The information gathered automatically by Configuration Auditor has proven invaluable to the UPMC Health System for ensuring the optimal running of its network on a day-to-day basis, in addition to working toward compliance.

"We have used Configuration Auditor to rebuild two crashed servers in the past six months," says Masters. "We use Ecora's change management functionality to diagnose potential problems, and we run configuration reports that I use to populate a database for asset reporting. We've used functions of Ecora to detect service pack levels and which machines are running IIS patches. Ecora has been very helpful."

Benefits:

HIPAA Compliance: "We are well into the process of connecting all of our facilities and Ecora has helped put us ahead of schedule for compliance."

Change Management: "We run Ecora every day. When I go into the cleanup and see a problem, I find it is because something has changed, such as a server that has been taken out of service without my knowledge. Ecora flags these things."

Disaster Recovery: "To have reports on such things as share permissions, which applications have been loaded, and where to go next after we are done rebuilding the operating system is extremely helpful," says Masters. The reports Masters runs are then used to populate an asset management database.

Employee Training & Retention: "Ecora has helped to define my position here at UPMC Health System. The application has encouraged me to understand the Windows operating system better because I have much more information to work with."