Reduce the network management burden: healthcare software provider finds low-cost answer to keeping track of data - Remote Monitoring

Communications News,  Dec, 2003  by Maria Piech

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Delivering quality medical care requires more than well-trained doctors and the latest medicine and equipment. Medicine is an information-based profession and better information technology improves patient outcomes. Headquartered in Skowhegan, Maine, Occupational Health Research (OHR) is a company that works to improve the treatment of injured workers and reduce the cost of their care through the application of information technology.

"We are primarily a software development company for hospitals and clinics that have occupational health clinics," says Barry Gray, OHR's director of information services. "We write software that helps them track injured workers."

The company offers a variety of services to its client base-nearly 800 hospitals, occupational health clinics and employee health programs serving more than 100,000 employers in 42 states. The primary product is software that runs on a Microsoft SOL database, incorporating patient scheduling, financial management, forms and reports generation, medical records management, and electronic claims submission. In addition, OHR provides training for occupational healthcare providers and acts as an application service provider for the Ohio Employee Health Partnership, a managed care organization serving 8,400 employers.

OHR has about one hundred Windows NT/ 2000/XP workstations at its three offices, both for its internal use as well as for training its clientele. The company's 25 servers primarily run Windows NT/2000, with a couple running Linux. All storage is direct attached.

Due to the simplicity of the company's infrastructure, a full-featured network and systems-management package was considered overkill, but OHR still needed to ensure that its systems stay up and secure in order to meet the critical needs of its clients, as well as to comply with privacy regulations contained in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). OHR found that the best solution was to go with low-cost point products designed to address particular problem areas.

Two years ago, when Microsoft introduced its new licensing program, OHR found it needed software that would inventory what was running on all its servers and desktops to ensure that it was not paying for more licenses than were actually being used. To address this issue, it bought OStivity from Somix Technologies, Sanford, Maine.

"We were trying at the time to track Microsoft licenses when they switched over, and it helped solve that problem," says Gray, "but ix is also nice to keep a handle on what is loaded on what machines."

OStivity inventories what versions of Windows is running, as well as remotely scanning all Windows NT/2000/XP boxes for all installed software and versions, and the hardware components. It also works with Red Hat Linux, Mac OSX and Sun Solaris 2.x, though these require the use of agents.

The software scans all machines in the network on a regular schedule and stores the information in a mySQL database. Administrators can then query to see which machines are running what or click on a machine's link to pull up a complete hardware and software inventory.

Among its features, the software includes a module for tracking invoices and licenses to ensure compliance in these areas. Gray found that he did not have any licensing problems, but OHR uses the software for other functions, as well. For example, the administrator responsible for maintaining the desktops and servers uses OStivity to determine which machines need patches. Since all the information is stored in the database, staff can go through the changes log to see any hardware or software changes on the piece of equipment that may be causing problems.

For security issues, OHR primarily uses a combination of two management products, Snort and Logalot. Snort is a network intrusion-detection system that OHR runs on one of its Linux servers. It performs real-time traffic analysis, packet logging, protocol analysis, and content searching and matching in order to detect such problems as denial-of-service attacks, port scans, OS fingerprinting, server message-block probes, buffer overflows and common gateway interface attacks.

While Snort is a free program, it lacks a graphical user interface and central management console. This limits its functionality in larger deployments due to the increased management costs.

The other security product used by OHR, Logalot from Somix, is an event log manager that aggregates items contained in all the syslogs and Windows event logs maintained by the various equipment and applications throughout the network, storing them in a mySQL database. The administrator has a console to review these entries, set thresholds and policies for what actions to take when the thresholds are crossed.

When an entry arises that requires action, Logalot will page, phone, e-mail or text message the administrator responsible for that particular device or system. Administrators can also write scripts to automatically perform routine actions, such as rebooting a hung machine.