Case Study: Heart Center Loves ISYS Search Tools
1/30/2007
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The Children's Heart Center, a Nevada-based medical practice with six locations in the state, houses more than 200,000 documents. To deal with the information glut, CHC turned to ISYS Search Software's ISYS:web 8 instead of Google. By implementing ISYS:web 8, CHC maintains a manageable intranet and supports patient interaction.
About CHC
The Children's Heart Center specializes in the diagnosis and care of heart disorders in children. The center is dedicated to providing a comprehensive resource for children and families -- from initial diagnosis, to post-care emotional health support. The center also provides opportunities for physicians to continue medical education and offers limited heart care for adults.
The Challenge
On a daily basis, physicians, business partners, and staff members at Children's Heart Center access the practice's intranet, where CHC deals with more than 200,000 documents. Every aspect of its practice relies upon the intranet for important information. Everything the CHC does to serve its patients is located here, including access to patient records, educational articles, billing history, etc. "We live on it," said Charles Kimble, information technologies manager of CHC.
As the practice grew, so did the amount of information housed on its intranet, and the center began to experience information overload. Increasingly, the IT department received requests from physicians unable to find important documents that were imperative to complete daily tasks. Ultimately, the business managers at CHC approached Kimble to find an answer.
"We want Google for our intranet," business managers at CHC requested. "We want to be able to search our intranet just as we search the Internet with Google." So Kimble began to search for options.
Selecting The Right Tool
According to Kimble, Google was not the answer because of its inability to provide the flexibility and functionality that a search engine on CHC's intranet required. A handful of enterprise search companies were also consulted and evaluated. Kimble eventually selected ISYS Search Software's ISYS:web 8 because it was best suited for the center's needs.
"ISYS is customizable and configurable," said Kimble. "We were able to make it do exactly what we wanted it to do. We found other search engines that may have worked, but none of these solutions were as near as robust as ISYS."
Along with its flexibility, ISYS was selected for its indexing strength, its automatic categorization feature, and its web administration interface.
(Those strengths earned ISYS a place in the finals of Intranet Journal's Product of the Year Awards.)
Implementation of ISYS was quick and effortless. Because of its flexibility, ISYS was molded to fit perfectly in CHC's existing environment. Kimble was able to start indexing and loading documents to the intranet in about 30 minutes.
"What I admired most about the implementation was the smoothness of ISYS' web-based configuration," said Kimble. "I could sit at my computer, go into a page and configure it all. In less than two hours, my entire site was complete. It's simple and effective."
Results
ISYS:web provided the CHC with an effective search solution. Integrating the ISYS search engine into CHC's intranet provided all employees with a portal to find needed information in a heartbeat. What's more, ISYS enabled the practice to thrive off of its success, rather than become crippled by an increasingly overbearing repository of information.
"Without ISYS, we couldn't find what we were looking for," said Kimble. "There was no way to find it. There were so many documents. It was as if we were not storing our own data. Now our data is available to us in a timely and relevant fashion."
Charles Kimble is the Children's Heart Center information technologies manager.
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