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HEALTH CARE / PHARMACEUTICALS / DONATION SERVICES

Abbott Laboratories www.abbott.com
Sales and Financial Data Warehouse Initiative
Project Lead: Peggy Mathias, Senior Manager HQ IT Applications, International Division
Project Description: Abbott launched an international sales data consolidation effort, developing a flexible information management infrastructure capable of accommodating future organizational changes and rapidly evolving business needs. The project integrated Kalido as a data warehouse, Oracle and PL/SQL for data staging, and Cognos for its reporting front end, providing 250 finance and marketing executives in 65 countries access to consistent, high-quality data.

The Carilion Clinic www.carilion.com
Enabling ITSM Connectivity
Project Lead: Mike Smith, Director of Technology Services
Project Description: Carilion rolled out an mobile IT services management initiative to support 11,000 employees spread across 800 square miles in western Virginia. The solution integrated RIM BlackBerry devices, HP Service Center, and Vettro 360 for IT Service Management. All relevant IT service management functionality on the mobile device was bundled into a customized mashup to provide a single-view app to 132 service technicians.

CentraState Healthcare System www.centrastate.com
Workflow-Enabled Clinical System Implementation
Project Lead: Indranil Ganguly, Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Project Description: To reduce avoidable medication errors and adverse drug effects, CentraState Healthcare partnered with Siemens Medical Solutions to revamp its health-care process management system, tapping Siemens Soarian and other solutions to deliver bar-coding capabilities both at the pharmacy and the bedside. The project involved nine critical systems and has thus far cut down adverse drug events by 54 percent, providing the nonprofit medical facility with approximately $2 million in savings per year.

Children's Hospital (Omaha, Neb.) www.chsomaha.org
Closed-Loop Medication Management System
Project Lead: Allana Cummings, Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Project Description: With input from physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, Children's Hospital integrated its clinical and pharmacy software systems to create an end-to-end medication management solution. The unified system provides practitioners and pharmacists with a shared, integrated medication management workflow and access to all patient data in a single record, thereby providing a shared, enterprisewide view of all medications administered to a patient and ensuring optimal continuity of care.

Compassion International www.compassion.com
Web to COMPASS: BPM Initiative
Project Lead: Brian Houghtaling, Enterprise Architecture Director
Project Description: Web to COMPASS was launched by Compassion to streamline its sponsor engagement and service processes, enabling the organization to automate data collection, review, and approval for providing assistance to needy children in third-world countries. The project integrates Microsoft BizTalk with Ultimus' BPM suite, tapping the organization's .Net development skills to form an SOA foundation. A homegrown database is used in conjunction with a Cognos LAVA appliance to provide BAM services that help monitor the performance of Web to COMPASS. Compassion's BPM efforts have also reduced the cycle time for processing its more than 475,000 case studies a year from one month to two days.

FirstHealth of the Carolinas www.firsthealth.org
Storage Consolidation
Project Lead: Dave Dillehunt, CIO
Project Description: Contending with 100 percent data growth year over year, the health-care network embarked on a storage consolidation effort, replacing its DAS (direct-attached storage) infrastructure with a NetApp FAS (fabric-attached storage) solution. The project threaded more than 650 applications to the new storage system across three hospitals and facilitated the construction of a community repository of clinical images for improving patient care across treatment locations.

MedicAlert www.medicalert.org
SOA Initiative
Project Lead: Jorge Mercado, Architect of Advanced Technology Group
Project Description: The medical informatics company transformed its storage, retrieval, and sharing of biomedical data from legacy client/server systems to a modern, more universally accessible SOA, enabling those with vital medical emergency needs to trade in traditional MedicAlert bracelets for USB fobs, rich with personal medical history and emergency response requirements data. [ Read the full MedicAlert finalist profile | See Top 10 Finalists slideshow ]

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The Schumacher Group www.tsged.com
Sales Force Automation
Project Lead: Douglas Menefee, Chief Information Officer
Project Description: Seeking to streamline sales force and recruiting operations, the emergency medicine management company rolled out a customized Salesforce initiative, integrating an array of applications, including a resource scheduling app and imaging solution for storing physician data. Tapping third-party AppExchange tools, the Schumacher Group was able to scrub thousands of records that were duplicates or misaligned due to poor data entry and to establish workflow and validation rules to ensure data accuracy into the future.

Solvay Pharmaceuticals www.solvaypharmaceuticals-us.com
Sales Force Effectiveness Initiative
Project Lead: Donna Lenning, Sr. IT Manager
Project Description: The pharmaceuticals firm revamped its inefficient paper-based sales operations and stovepiped systems, launching a streamlined sales force initiative complete with tablet PCs, digitized forms and signatures, and integrated client and back-end apps. [ Readthe full Solvay finalist profile | See Top 10 Finalists slideshow ]

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Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute www.ari.vt.edu
HPC Cluster for Cancer Research
Project Lead: Dr. Saifur Rahman, Director of ARI
Project Description: Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Institute constructed a high-performance computing cluster for cancer research. The 16-node cluster is based on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and runs on HP ProLiant DL 145 machines. Parallelized apps written in MATLAB tap vast quantities of data acquired from biologists and physicians to perform molecular profiling of cancer patients.

The Well Project www.thewellproject.org
International AIDS Information Portal for Women
Project Lead: Richard G. Averitt, Chief Operating Officer
Project Description: The Well Project, an organization founded to curtail the spread of HIV/AIDS among women, created an International Information Portal to provide treatment information for AIDS patients and caregivers in multiple languages, beginning with English and Spanish. The portal was built on EMC Documentum content management and collaboration software, BEA WebLogic, and Lionbridge Technologies Freeway software for language management and translation. The infrastructure supports concurrent information and real-time updates across portals. Additional portals catering to speakers of languages other than English and Spanish are in the offing.