Historic Hospital Aims To Go PaperlessHistoric Hospital Aims To Go Paperless

A 152-year-old New Orleans hospital is adding an IBM mainframe to its IT systems as part of an effort to move toward paperless patient care.

Touro Infirmary, a teaching hospital founded in 1852, will use an IBM z890 server to store and process clinical data and business records. The system will run Siemens' Invision health-care software to perform tasks such as physician queries, order entry, and patient billing. More than 2,000 doctors and other health professionals at the hospital will have access to the system. Touro is also installing IBM's TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server Model 800 to increase storage capacity, IBM said Tuesday.

Touro is one of the first institutions to purchase IBM's z890 system, which debuted last month. Aimed at small and midsize businesses, the z890 features a scaled-down, lower-priced version of IBM's z/OS operating system.