CSW and Oracle Demonstrate Scalability of Case Notes

CSW Health announced this week it had successfully completed initial scalability tests for its Case Notes shared electronic records system. The tests have been carried out with technology partners including Oracle.

John Chelsom, managing director of CSW Health, said: “The Case Notes product is the result of over ten years research and development on XML database technology and over five years applying that technology to shared care records systems.”

Trudy Norris-Grey, vice president of strategy and alliances with Oracle UK, told E-Health Insider: “CSW is the clinical application and Oracle is providing the infrastructure with the scalability and security required.” Oracle has ported the Case Notes application onto its 9i database system and application server infrastructure, including its health transaction base.

Case Notes is already deployed at major NHS sites, including Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, with installations handling in excess of a million patient records and thousands of users.

John Skinner, assistant director of ICT, Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust said, “Case Notes is now being used across the whole of the health care system in Oxfordshire with over 5,000 active clinical users including usage in all the acute hospital trusts, the mental health trust, all the community hospitals and all GP practices.”

Phase one of the current scalability testing with Oracle has shown a benchmark capacity for Case Notes supporting 10 million patient records and 10,000 concurrent users, delivering over 3,500 transactions per second (over 12 million transactions per hour). The user response times for viewing the patient records through a standard web browser are less than one second.

CSW is now progressing with the second phase of the testing programme, which will see the benchmark raised to 60 million patient records and up to 50,000 concurrent users. The testing phase is due to be completed by the end of September.

Dave Nurse, CSW’s technical director added: “Case Notes has been designed from day one as a high performance, scalable system, and our releases are routinely tested to five million records and 2000 concurrent users. Now it’s great to get the support from Oracle to create new benchmarks for Case Notes.”