CDW Healthcare Provides IT Infrastructure Solutions To Help Leading Physician Groups Improve Patient Safety And Operational Efficiency.

VERNON HILLS, Ill. -- CDW Healthcare, part of the public sector subsidiary of CDW Corporation (NASDAQ:CDWC), and a leading provider of technology products and services to healthcare organizations, today announced that Clearwater Cardiovascular and Interventional Consultants, M.D., P.A., Clearwater, Fla.; Summit Medical Group, P.A., Berkeley Heights, N.J.; and Texas Gulf Coast Medical Group, LLC, Houston, Texas, have partnered with CDW Healthcare to provide technology infrastructure solutions that support the organizations' digital healthcare initiatives designed to improve delivery of care.

"The adoption of PACS1 and EMR2 systems and their underlying IT infrastructures represents a significant investment in time and capital for a physician practice," said Bob Rossi, director of CDW Healthcare. "Delivering a return on that investment requires a solid understanding of both the technology and its healthcare applications. CDW Healthcare is uniquely positioned to provide technology expertise and options around the IT infrastructures that support advanced PACS and EMR implementations."

Clearwater Cardiovascular Implements All-In-One PACS Storage Network

Clearwater Cardiovascular and Interventional Consultants, a specialty practice focusing on cardiovascular medicine, selected CDW Healthcare to help it create a comprehensive storage solution for the organization's PACS system. Today, the organization has the ability to store all images on a centralized, secure network, enabling rapid access to critical images and ensuring data redundancy and survivability.

Clearwater had purchased a digital echocardiogram system with limited storage. The practice required a storage solution that could support digital echocardiograms as well as other modalities moving forward with limited manual intervention. Clearwater worked with CDW Healthcare to select EMC Centera as the foundation for its PACS storage solution.

"Our CDW Healthcare account team brought a deep knowledge of storage vendors as well as a solid understanding of our unique requirements," said Connie Kleber, chief information officer, Clearwater Cardiovascular and Interventional Consultants. "The CDW Healthcare team was very good about handling even the smallest issues with EMC, freeing me to work on the internal processes and change management required for a successful implementation."

To ensure data redundancy, the practice implemented a mirrored storage system, with the primary PACS storage system located in the organization's Clearwater office and the mirrored system in a satellite office. This configuration streamlines HIPAA compliance by eliminating the need to transport back-up tapes. Redundancy also offers another layer of safety in the hurricane-prone region.

Summit Medical Group Implements an Organization-wide PACS Solution

Summit Medical Group, a multi-specialty practice that uses a team approach for the evaluation and management of medical conditions, worked with CDW Healthcare to design and implement a unified storage infrastructure for the practice's PACS platform. Today, Summit is improving patient care with its PACS implementation, which allows more rapid access to images and ensures their sustainability. It is also moving toward becoming a paperless environment for imaging, allowing Summit's physicians to work more effectively and efficiently by accessing images when they need them rather than waiting for a film delivery.

Summit's PACS system, which is built on EMC storage technology, is live and running for multiple modalities, including general x-ray, computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound and more. In addition to the storage component, Summit also purchased diagnostic-quality Planar monitors and work stations for the PACS system from CDW Healthcare. Summit recently started a second phase of its PACS implementation, which will allow physicians to review x-ray images in exam rooms or their offices and interpret the results or share them with a patient.

"CDW Healthcare provided the expertise we needed for our extensive storage requirements," said Craig Edwards, network manager, Summit Medical Group, P.A. "We have been working with CDW for seven years because it has consistently brought value to the table. Our CDW Healthcare account team helped us look at our needs today and moving forward to identify the best solution for our organization. Their depth of knowledge and responsiveness was tremendously valuable to us during an implementation that involved significant financial and operational risk."

"CDW continues to invest in advanced technical resources to provide in-depth advice on the market's latest offerings so our customers can focus on their critical strategic business and patient-centric decisions," said Rossi.

Texas Gulf Coast Medical Group Joins EMR to Mobile Point of Care

To eliminate the operational and storage burdens of paper charts as well as increase the quality of patient care, Texas Gulf Coast Medical Group, a multi-center healthcare organization serving more than 50,000 patients, has partnered with CDW Healthcare to provide the hardware and technology infrastructure that supports its new EMR and Mobile Point of Care (MPOC) solutions. When fully implemented later this year, the system will allow physicians to retrieve medical records and enter prescriptions at the point of care via tablet PCs, vastly improving the accuracy of order entry and reducing the time needed for document retrieval.

"The joint EMR/MPOC implementation represents one of the largest and most complex projects our practice has undertaken," said Chuck Kubricht, IT Supervisor, Texas Gulf Coast Medical Group. "CDW Healthcare provided excellent guidance on pricing and vendor selection for hardware and servers, helping us to integrate separate hardware components into a unified solution that provided us with system redundancy. Once complete, our physicians will have the tools they need to consistently provide the highest level of patient care via a secure, reliable and mobile network."

In addition to optimizing patient care within the facilities themselves, Texas Gulf Coast's EMR implementation will utilize an internal web server to provide remote access to health records via a Secure Socket Layer (SSL). The solution includes 52 Motion tablet PCs (one for each doctor and nurse) and two HP servers each for application, database and terminal needs, all run on a Cisco-powered network equipped with wireless control. The entire network provides for full redundancy via dual switches and controllers as well as clustered database servers for failover capability.

About CDW Healthcare

CDW Healthcare, part of the public sector subsidiary of CDW Corporation (NASDAQ:CDWC), is a leading provider of technology products and services focused exclusively on healthcare organizations. Working in partnership with customers ranging from small rural providers to large and complex integrated delivery networks, CDW Healthcare responds with a sense of urgency to customer technology needs, delivering best-in-class solutions from top-name brands such as IBM, HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Planar, EMC, Ergotron Symantec, Motion, Lenovo, NEC, Xerox and Symbol. CDW Healthcare account management teams build strong customer relationships by responding to customer IT infrastructure requirements with in-depth advice, technical expertise and the best technology that the industry has to offer.

For more information about CDW Healthcare offerings, procurement options, services and solutions, call 1.800.410.4239, or visit the CDW Healthcare Web site at http://www.cdw.com/healthcare.

1 Picture Archiving and Communications Systems

2 Electronic Medical Record