Allen Montgomery, Corporate Director for Systems and Development, Baptist Health South Florida

Advanced Medicine

Staying ahead of the curve in South Florida

No matter your line of business, most people agree that when it comes to curves, being ahead of them is better than being behind. And when your business is healthcare, you simply cannot succeed any other way. "As a not-for-profit, we aren't required to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)," says Allen Montgomery, corporate director for systems and development with Baptist Health South Florida in Miami. "But we apply those standards to ourselves regardless. Our board of trustees and executive management team believe that some similar form of regulation is coming to the not-for-profit sector sooner or later. This way, we'll be that much further ahead of the curve."

Being ahead of the curve seems to be paying off for Baptist Health and, more importantly, for its patients. Baptist Health has been named one of the top 100 'most wired' hospitals by Hospital and Health Network magazine for the past seven years. The organization's adherence to non-mandated regulations has produced clear results: Mortality rates at Baptist Health-which operates six acute care hospitals-are among the lowest in the region, according to statistics published by the state of Florida.

To meet its goals and the self-imposed compliance mandates, Baptist Health deployed a number of Symantec products for backup, recovery, and compliance management. "Our portfolio has been validated by most of the Symantec and Veritas acquisitions over the past few years," Montgomery says. "In fact, password self-service is something we helped BindView [now part of Symantec Compliance Control Suite] bring to market back in the day."

Montgomery leads a team of about 60 of Baptist Health's approximately 350 IT employees. His group is responsible for identifying and maximizing opportunities in new and existing technologies that might improve business processes at Baptist Health facilities, which include Baptist, Baptist Children's, Doctors, Homestead and South Miami Hospitals, Baptist Outpatient Services, Baptist Cardiac & Vascular Institute in Miami-Dade County, and Mariners Hospital in the Florida Keys.

"We're measured on patient satisfaction, physician satisfaction, and employee satisfaction-organization-wide," Montgomery says. "Internally, we're measured by system availability, including up to 99.999 uptime for certain business-critical applications, and making sure that even if a system does go down, we can bring back everything we need as quickly and as inexpensively as possible, minimizing patient care and financial impacts on the organization."

A server a day keeps disaster at bay

A business culture that encourages saving everything is, in part, driving the growth at Baptist Health, says Montgomery. "Management has the notion that disk space is cheap, so why should we purge or archive when we can just buy more disk? Now, we can communicate to management that buying disk is relative to the criticality and sensitivity of the data, and that's helped move us toward finding more cost-effective strategies."