The Business Challenge

Kindred Healthcare's Commitment to Quality Patient Care

Kindred Healthcare's mission of providing "high quality patient care and outstanding customer service and becoming the most trusted and respected provider of healthcare services in every community we serve" is evident in throughout their 560+ long-term care, rehabilitation centers, and nursing facilities in 39 states.

The company has a "people first" approach and has a tradition of encouraging and honoring the dedication of employees who demonstrate that care for patients through its "Above and Beyond" awards. Kindred's attention to quality for its patients is also legendary, with more than 90 percent of its Hospital Division customers rating care as Very Good to Excellent. The high quality care has also been honored by numerous outside agencies, including the American Health Care Association, where it has received more awards from the organization than any other company over the past four years (68 versus 37 for the next highest winner).

Kindred's ongoing Kaleidoscope contest encourages patients to express their expressions of hope and connection via poetry and art . Indeed, it is this art that first greets website visitors and it is further incorporated throughout the site.

Kindred's Business Takes Off

With its ability to deliver quality services, it is not surprising that Kindred's business has grown significantly, with annual revenues rising from $3.2 billion in 2002 to $4.3 billion in 2006.

Behind the scenes, Kindred achieved its success through meticulous and thoughtful management of every aspect of its business. Its growth is attributable to several factors including: a respected reputation for quality services; timely tactical decisions regarding precise allocation of its healthcare resources; and by making the best possible strategic decisions with respect to business acquisitions and redeployments.

The Symptoms of Rapid Growth

As the company evolved, its information technology infrastructure was repeatedly challenged. In addition to supporting 51,000 employees, its business was now far more complex with as many as 138 active company codes and 58,000 Profit/Cost Centers to manage. Data management problems had grown as well, with databases processing increasing from 200 GB in to more than 2 Terabytes in less than 10 years. Kindred's databases helped manage every aspect of the business, from quality metrics to financial reports, and were literally, the lifeblood of the company.

The increased quantity and complexity of data collected by and reported back to the company was pushing the existing IT infrastructure to its limits. During month-end closing periods the old servers were experiencing 100 percent utilization every morning. Periodic usage spikes caused the same problem at unpredictable times as well. Online response times were slow and evening batch and payroll runs often ran into morning hours which affected critical daytime access.

Increased system usage created additional demands. Daniel Poff, Kindred's Director of Database Administration and SAP Basis notes, "We needed a system that could deal with 250 to 500 or more facilities with 5 users each, so the complexity gets quite large."

Kindred also wanted to upgrade their Business Intelligence software to help manage the growth that was currently clogging the information technology arteries.

As a "patient," Kindred badly needed a systems transplant and an infusion of the latest technologies throughout the IT infrastructure.

The Solution

Kindred came to Itanium Solutions Alliance Founding Sponsor HP for help in architecting an entirely new system, and to make the transition as quickly as possible. They needed to increase overall system capacity, improve response times and make the system more available to the distributed network of tactical and strategic decision-makers throughout Kindred's organization.

To manage increasing report complexity, a growing user base who needed access to data and reports on time, and to keep up with the massive online databases that kept the business moving, Kindred implemented HP's Integrity Servers with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and upgraded Business Intelligence software to mySAP ERP 2005, the Microsoft® Windows Server 2003 operating system, and Microsoft® SQL Server 2000.

To improve system availability, Kindred leveraged Intel Itanium's native high availability features, including server cluster support to allow rapid switching to other servers in case of hardware failures.

The Results

Once the system surgery was completed, Kindred initiated a series of benchmark tests to assess the new IT system's vital signs versus the legacy systems it replaced. The results were immediately evident:

• Financial reports ran between2.4X to 2.7X faster
• Human resources reports compiled between 2.6X and 3.7X faster,
• Data query results during Dialog sessions processed between 3.3 X to 8.0 X faster.

Additionally, in a controlled test of a large composite production control batch processing experiment, the new system took just 19 hours, a 24 percent time savings over the prior system.

The end result is a dramatic change in the system performance, both in terms of response and availability. Instead of waiting for information or making tradeoffs as to what reports to prepare and when to ask for them, Kindred can keep its focus on managing its business.

With Kindred's Itanium® solution everyone, from the company's wide user base using its business intelligence solutions, to the nurses who tend every bedside, to the patients receiving care, can rest a bit easier at night.