All Department of Defense hospitals use a mandatory medical information system called Composite Health Care Systems which run on a Digital VAX, Alphas and UNIX PC clusters. Care providers (system users) previously used multiple workstations or terminals to access all the services they needed. U.S. Army hospitals are located worldwide with the systems support office, Army Health Care Systems Support Activity (HCSSA), based out of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. HCSSA is responsible for the Defense Medical Information System, and it was their task to find a way to more efficiently deploy client/server applications from one location.
The U.S. Army Office purchased 12,000 seats of NOV*IX, chosen by the Army hospital group because it allows all IP addresses and user workstations to be centrally set up and managed at one site, Fort Sam Houston, while providing support for existing TCP/IP-based applications and new client/server applications that are under development.
By implementing NOV*IX, administrators also wanted to provide users with easy access to the Composite Health Care Systems, e-mail, and office automation applications from a single workstation rather than needing multiple workstations or terminals.
Now using NOV*IX, NetWare users located at Army hospitals worldwide can have full TCP/IP connectivity, allowing them take advantage of distributed applications, such as e-mail and databases, by accessing host systems via TCP/IP. In addition, care providers on the NetWare LAN caneasily access CHCS and at the same time access e-mail and office automation applications form a single workstation rather than needing multiple workstations or terminals which were required prior to the NOV*IX implimentation.
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