Complex Environment, Mission-Critical Needs

As the world's oldest and largest private institution devoted to prevention, patient care, research, and education in cancer, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) sets the standard of care for people with cancer. The Hospital Administration and Information Systems organizations collaborate to provide technology and business support to thousands of clinicians and operations staff across multiple locations in the New York area who are engaged in the task of providing superior patient care.

More than two thousand clinical workstations are located throughout MSKCC. Departmental and enterprise-wide systems run in a distributed database environment to provide access to mission-critical data such as patient registration, admission and discharge; appointment scheduling; laboratory results; etc. The myriad of clinical applications that access this constantly-changing data must be responsive, high-performing, and reliable.

Immediate, Effective Results

In June 1998, as MSKCC prepared to roll out a new packaged order management application, major performance issues threatened the viability of the entire project. As this core patient care system struggled under the load of the controlled training environment, just weeks away from a scheduled go-live date, it became clear that it would never withstand the tremendous demands of the production environment.

Fortunately, MSKCC had prior experience with the effectiveness of Adeptis consultants using Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner performance testing tool. Despite the fact that a third-party vendor developed the software, Adeptis consultants were able to immediately identify very specific areas of performance problems within the application. "Literally within hours, Adeptis was able to isolate the source of the performance problems," recalls MSKCC project manager Karen Malbin, a consultant with HealthCare Projects. "Our systems expertise and the LoadRunner testing tool allowed us to zoom in on problematic stored procedures in the database and specific code in the application," recalls Steve Nevins of Adeptis.

Because MSKCC was able to immediately identify and provide documented, scientific evidence of the exact nature of the performance problems in their environment, they were able to work swiftly with the vendor to correct the problems. Using LoadRunner to generate virtual users and emulate the expected system demand, MSKCC could verify when the corrections yielded satisfactory results. In July 1998, barely a month after Adeptis started performance testing in an attempt to salvage the application roll-out, the order management system went live.

Streamlined Processes, Successful Implementations

MSKCC project manager Karen Malbin, a consultant with HealthCare Projects, emphasizes the importance of ensuring successful implementations within a clinical systems environment. "The disaster avoidance is money in the bank," she says. Malbin credits Adeptis and Mercury Interactive for enabling MSKCC to ensure success, even for the deployment of third-party software - too often a wildcard in complex clinical environments. "The organization has incorporated the concept of performance testing vendor supplied applications, so that we avoid production failures and are able to deal with issues prior to roll-out," says Malbin.

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