H3C Supports the Building of Qingdao Public Health Information Platform

Background

Qingdao Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention was founded in 1997 on the foundation of the Qingdao Anti-Epidemic Station after it took the social disease prevention and control activities carried out by some specialized hospitals, such as leprosy, venereal disease, and tuberculosis. As a fully funded institution directly under the Qingdao Health Bureau, Qingdao Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention undertakes the responsibilities of disease prevention and control, health testing and evaluation, health education and promotion, applied research and guidance, and technical management and services on behalf of the government.

Among its 188 employees at present, 61 of them have undergraduate degrees, 15 have graduate degrees or higher, 37 have associate senior titles or above, and 9 have been designated as adjunct professors, associate professors, and master's supervisors by the School of Public Health, Shandong University and the Medical College of Qingdao University. Chief physician Pang Zengchang has been appointed as adjunct associate professor by the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Qingdao Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention has set up 15 service departments, among which the epidemiology department and labor hygiene inspection are the key disciplines and characteristic laboratories of the Health Bureau. In 1999, a brand new office building was put into operation with a laboratory which was leading in Shandong Province and even China.

Public health information construction is the key to measuring the ability of a city or region to monitor and prevent various diseases as well as to prevent and control major epidemics. As a renowned tourist city, Qingdao hosted the sailing events of Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics. This required the city to significantly improve its city construction and management capabilities. More importantly, Qingdao was required to ensure the success of the sailing events by building a public health system. For the prevention and control of various diseases in the city, the leaders of the Qingdao government and Health Bureau not only attached great importance to the treatment methods and techniques, but also used information technology to get accurate and fast information about the diseases, to provide the basis for decision making to stop serious epidemics and disease outbreaks and spreads.

By the end of 2007, Qingdao had built a complete public health information network, which could be connected to health administrative departments at all levels, disease prevention and control institutions, health supervision institutions, medical institutions, and community health service institutions. The Qingdao Public Health Information Platform integrates health information resources in Qingdao and provides a comprehensive public health information application system. The platform achieves the goal of information network coverage and a complete public health application system based on the concept of "vertical to the end and horizontal to the edge" proposed by the Health Department. It also meets the requirements of urban health management and the requirements of the Olympic Games for health information technology.

The Qingdao Public Health Information Platform has a complete network platform system with rapid response and accurate and timely processing. The core system of this platform is the electronic information network system of the three-tier network of the Center of Disease Control (CDC) in Qingdao (it refers to the Qingdao Public Health Information Platform), which is located in the Qingdao CDC building. The platform is connected with the city WAN system at the office location by optical fiber, which includes Qingdao Health Bureau, Qingdao Maternal and Child Health Center, Qingdao Health Supervision Institute, Qingdao 120 Emergency Center, Qingdao Talent Center, and Qingdao Medical Association. At the same time, the platform connects the remote WAN systems of the health bureaus in the counties and cities with 2M SDH links.

Based on the full utilization of existing information network resources, the Qingdao Public Health Information Platform has provided a city information-sharing network system to handle emergent issues. The internal subsystems of the network system and the city network platform use a unified interface to integrate the functions of command and coordination, prediction and forecast, health supervision, medical treatment, and material storage. This achieves horizontal and vertical interconnection across the city, creating an advanced public health information network system in China for responding to emergencies.

The main aspects of the project construction are as follows:

Build a complete information network platform for emergency commands.

Build a complete electronic information network system of disease control, health supervision, and maternal and child health care in the city, district, and street (town).

Build a complete electronic reporting information network system covering the whole city to respond to emergencies, including infectious disease and epidemic monitoring, food poisoning, occupational poisoning, environmental pollution, and radioactive contamination.

Establish a complete electronic information network system covering the whole city to respond to medical emergencies in medical institutions, designated hospitals, and infectious disease clinics (including 120 pre-hospital first aid).

Build a complete electronic network system to prepare talents and materials for emergencies.

The technical experts from H3C and business management leaders from the Qingdao CDC went through in-depth discussions. Both sides agreed that the Qingdao Public Health Information Platform can adopt the concept of IP-based architecture proposed by H3C to guide the planning and construction of the health information platform.

"IP has advanced to a very mature technological state after so many years of development. The IP architecture, which is used to operate all information technology, has the potential to become a trend. The health care system involves numerous service systems, so it is crucial to establish standards to remove the obstacles that limit information sharing across different services. The full range of products and solutions based on the IP technology provided by H3C can meet this need." A leader from the Qingdao CDC said.

WAN internconnection solution

The communication lines between the Qingdao health information center and 12 health bureaus in districts and counties and 5 municipal health institutions are interconnected by leased optical fiber or carrier-grade 2M Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH). This ensures the security, confidentiality, reliability, and availability of the three-tier network of public health in Qingdao with a large communication volume. At the same time, the long-term development and needs of the health system in multimedia and video transmission can be met to lay the foundation for the future building of the "tri-network convergence" in the health sector.

Health institutions, including the health bureaus and 120 emergency sub-centers, the health supervision offices, and CDCs in districts and counties, can also build WAN connections by leasing fiber optic or Digital Data Network (DDN) lines.

As information transmitted upstream from the information collection stations in villages (towns) is not complex and the amount of data is small,the data transmission duration is not long, and the timeliness of network connections is not strictly required. Therefore, it is recommended to use a dial-up connection to connect the data collection stations in villages (towns) to the WAN network. This unifies the monitoring of the public health institutions in the grassroots into the public health system and greatly reduces the investment, creating considerable economic and social benefits.

LAN solution

The three-tier information network of disease control covers a wide area with a large number of information points. To ensure high-speed data exchange in the network, the H3C S9512 switch was selected as the core switch for the internal network, and high-density Gigabit interface service boards were configured. This guarantees access to the switches on each floor switch of the CDC building, and access to the CDC tertiary network system at Gigabit bandwidth for each municipal agency in the city by leasing bare fiber from the carrier. Each municipal institute in the city is required to connect to both the internal network (a private network) and external network of the CDC's three-tier network system. To reduce the number of bare optical fibers leased from carriers and to meet the demand for physical separation of internal and external networks, the three-tier network system uses CWDM technology and is interconnected with the CDC network. While the configuration meets all existing requirements, this core switch has 7 idle service slots. The H3C S9500 switch supports a 10 Gigabit interface, IPv6, a built-in firewall module, and other features to meet the upgrade requirements of the CDC's three-tier network system in the next three to five years.

To meet the future access of a large number of community hospital institutions and other hospitals, the H3C S9512 10 Gigabit Chassis Routing Switch is selected as the convergence switch for medical institutions at all levels, while high-density Gigabit service boards were configured. The switch, as an access device for a large number of community health institutions in the future, can meet the access needs of community medical institutions and other hospitals. The network information systems of many hospitals and other community medical institutions are not centrally managed by information centers and are located in a decentralized manner. Therefore, there will be a considerable security risk if these information systems are directly connected to the internal network. To ensure the security of the system, the H3C F1000-A Gigabit firewall is adopted for the security control between the convergence switch and the core switch. This guarantees the security and robustness of the three-tier network system of the CDC.

H3C switches are selected as access devices for the medical institutions in the city, district, and country, which have high performance and provide Layer 3 capabilities. The fiber optic network is used to connect the network of these institutions to the three-tier network of the CDC. As information transmitted upstream from the information collection stations in villages (towns) is not complex and the amount of data is small,the data transmission duration is not long, and the timeliness of network connections is not strictly required. Therefore, it is recommended to use a VPN connection to connect the data collection stations in villages (towns) to the three-tier information network of disease control. This unifies the monitoring of the public health institutions in the grassroots into the public health system and greatly reduces the investment, creating considerable economic and social benefits. The H3C Secpath V100 VPN gateway is configured to meet the needs of CDC data collection stations in villages (towns), temporary CDC data collection stations, and offsite personnel to access the internal network of the CDC's three-tier network system. To ensure that the municipal government can unify and coordinate various departments when diseases and epidemics occur, the internal network of the CDC's three-tier network system is interconnected with the Jinhong network through a firewall to achieve smooth interconnection with higher-level departments.

Internet access solution

Municipal health institutes such as the health bureau, health supervision bureau, 120 emergency center, and CDC need to access the Internet and the municipal CDC private network to use the network resources and release disease control information to the public. The centralized network structure can be used in the Internet access solution, which means configuring a unified network egress and server in the network center to centralize user management. Each institute uses the Gigabit fiber optic cable to connect to the core switch of the municipal health information center and then connects to the network through a network egress. Centralized network management makes it easier to design and implement security policy management. For example, to centrally control and protect critical server resources and restrict unauthorized access from outside, the firewall SecPath F1000-A can be deployed at the network egress with security products including the H3C Intrusion Prevention System IPS200E.

IP building and storage and communication system

In the data center, H3C Gigabit switches and IX1000T high-capacity IP storage devices are selected to build the IP-SAN storage area network architecture for the CDC's three-tier network system for centralized data storage and management. This ensures the storage and sharing of massive data in the public health system.

To improve communication efficiency and reduce telephone costs, an IP telephone system has been deployed. It facilitates communication and coordination among the departments covered by the three-tier network of CDC, which can improve the response speed of disease control, control the scope of disease spread, and achieve the goal of disease prevention and control. The H3C XE2000 voice server has been deployed at CDC and the VG voice gateway and IP phone have been deployed at all levels of medical institutions. This allows for IP transmission of voice across the network. The current network bandwidth also ensures future video conferencing deployments and achieves real-time transmission of meetings over the network.

Solution features

Open and integrated system

The system is designed with the usage of the international standard protocol IP. The network switching, communication, storage, management, and various applications are operated through the IP architecture.

High performance and scalability

The system supports various high-speed network technologies (such as Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet). In the early stage of network building, simpler and more practical Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet technologies can be used to meet the needs of the service. In the network scale expansion stage, the network can be easily expanded to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10Gbps) to ensure the network service quality. Network devices adopt advanced modular technologies. This ensures that the devices can flexibly form different systems and conveniently be replaced and expanded.

Redundancy solution ensures stability

A. Link failure tolerance Transmission links should support the backup function. In case of failure of the main line, the backup line can be used as a replacement immediately.

B. Device failure tolerance Network devices should be configured with redundant power and processing systems and support hot-swapping of modules to avoid single point failures of the system.

Integrated network management

With the expansion of network scale and the increase of system complexity, network management and troubleshooting become more and more difficult. This solution provides an advanced network management tool, H3C intelligence Management Center (iMC), which can centralize the management of network devices through a graphical interface.

Qingdao CDC has successfully adopted H3C's new information construction concept, setting a good example for information construction in Qingdao's public health field and laying a solid foundation for the integration and opening of the public health system and information sharing. Qingdao City thus successfully welcomed the sailing events of Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics with a new posture.