E-BUSINESS ON DEMAND, A CASE STUDY—TEINOS Established in 1999, Teinos is an Italian health care company that develops solutions for managing, transmitting, and archiving patient data and diagnostic imaging. Its primary offering is P@ris, a Web-based platform for radiological examination management that includes reservations, medical reporting, and archiving. Background After developing an innovative Web-based radiology service management system, Teinos turned to IBM for e-business on demand services to reduce the infrastructure cost of deploying its solution. Teinos sought to generate new market opportunities with a Web-based radiology service, P@ris. The service would enable smaller health care providers to leverage the expensive radiological equipment generally available only at larger health care organizations. Diagnostic imaging is critical for quality patient care, but radiological equipment is expensive for health care providers to support. Teinos' radiological service management system addressed health care providers' unique business challenges, but to make the system economically feasible, the company needed to deliver its solution through a flexible IT infrastructure. Teinos needed to pay only for the IT capacity it used, just as its customers would pay only for the radiological services they used. The solution was obvious: e-business on demand. Teinos could have developed the infrastructure necessary to support P@ris itself, but this effort would have entailed tremendous start-up and ongoing costs. Instead, it decided to focus on core competencies and partner with IBM for its infrastructure needs. IBM's e-business on demand services, which are built on open standards, allowed Teinos to deploy a world-class infrastructure on an as-needed basis. The arrangement represents the first European partnership for deploying e-business on demand in the health care industry. IBM stores all of Teinos' radiological data at its Internet data centers, which ensure maximum security and access speed. Service levels are consistently high, and all aspects of the P@ris system are seamlessly synchronized. The Results Using P@ris, patients at small hospitals undergo radiological tests at large hospitals, and their doctors access the results—including reports and diagnostic images—through a secure Internet connection. The client hospitals are charged on a per-use basis, limiting their costs, while the larger hospitals defray the expense of operating the equipment. In addition, the patients' doctors are able to quickly and securely share test results with other physicians—a key element of the diagnostic workflow. For Teinos' customers, P@ris reduces staff time by enabling faster authorization and scheduling of radiological treatment. It allows physicians and health care providers to collaborate more efficiently, with rapid access to patient information and radiology results. And it ensures patient confidentiality with high security standards. For Teinos, the key to P@ris' success has been IBM e-business on demand. Teinos was able to rapidly roll out and expand its offering because it did not need to build either the initial infrastructure or the capacity to meet peak demand. The company continues to benefit from reduced complexity and increased agility, while meeting its customers' needs and expectations. |
