06/08-08   -   Press releases

Personal Health Record Ready for Nation-Wide Use: LifeSensor Passes Performance Benchmark safely

10,000 virtual users access 10 million
LifeSensor personal health records simultaneously. Response times are stable at less than two seconds. In a nutshell, this is the result of a
ten-day performance test conducted by eHealth specialist
InterComponentWare AG (ICW) at the Hewlett Packard European
Performance and Benchmark Center. The result proves again: LifeSensor is ready for large-scale use.

The performance test verified LifeSensor´s capacity, performance and scalabil-ity under extreme conditions. LifeSensor is a Web-based personal health
record that enables anyone to safely store copies of their health relevant infor-mation and manage it, no matter when or where. Only the owner has access to this personal information. However, users can permit their doctor, pharmacist, hospital or other health care providers to use their data.

The performance test scenario did not just simulate access by 10,000 virtual users to a database consisting of 10 million personal health records, but also by 20,000 doctors and pharmacists. While patients, for example, enter health information relating to their most recent medical appointments or create new appointments, doctors process larger amounts of data when synchronizing their patients´ personal health records with their own local patient documenta-tion systems. Peak loads during the performance benchmark showed that up to 700 simultaneous record accesses were possible, system performance remain-ing stable. That means that even over a prolonged period of time up to 8,500 users could process personal health records at any given time. At times of peak use, more than 10,000 simultaneous users were online. The results con-firmed that the LifeSensor personal health record is not only highly capable and scalable but also especially secure.

"ICW has done exemplary work in designing and developing the LifeSensor personal health record platform. Running on HP´s hardware, LifeSensor
delivers outstanding results and fulfills the requirements of markets worldwide", says Hans-Jürgen Preuss, sales manager for the health sector of Hewlett Packard Germany.

"Personal health record platforms need to be scalable, highly accessible,
stable, and above all secure, so that users and health care providers can use the records anytime, world-wide. The test results prove once again that
LifeSensor is ready for widespread use", adds Peter Reuschel, CEO of ICW.

Test parameters
The benchmark test was conducted using industrial standard hardware and operating system software from leading technology providers. Among the equipment used were ProLiant DL 380 G5 servers with quad-core Intel-Xeon processors and AMD Opteron quad-core processors. Also used was an HP EVA 4000 SAN storage system equipped with 5 TB hard disk storage. The sys-tem was run using the Novell Suse SLES 10 64-bit operating system, and with Oracle 10g R2 and Real Application Cluster Option as the database. The de-sired high level of user load was simulated using Apache JMeter freeware.

Along with ICW´s Master Patient Index (MPI), one of the components of ICW´s Professional Exchange Server, LifeSensor is the second solution out of the ICW portfolio to be subjected to performance testing at the Hewlett Packard European Performance and Benchmark Center. Together with its partners, ICW conducts periodic performance benchmarks for the continuous improve-ment of its product line.

About InterComponentWare:
InterComponentWare AG (ICW) is a leading international eHealth specialist with locations in Germany, the United States, Austria, Switzerland, and Bulgaria. Its solutions for networking the various players in the healthcare system lastingly improve process-oriented communication and data integrity, and therefore also the quality of healthcare. Among other things, ICW develops and distributes software and hardware components for national and regional eHealth infrastructures, the LifeSensor personal health record as well as networking solutions for hospitals and phy-sician offices. As part of the bIT4health consortium, ICW provided important consulting services for the implementa-tion of the electronic health card in Germany, is involved in the Austrian eCard project and has recently won the pilot project for the national health card in Bulgaria.