By Iqbal Khan
Distributed caching provides scalability that can relieve overloaded server farms and re-invigorate listless systems.
As Web and service-oriented architecture technologies become more popular, hospitals are adopting them rapidly for automating their operations and allowing their administrative staffs, doctors and patients to directly access the hospital information system (HIS). While this has introduced a lot of efficiencies in hospital operations, it has also introduced new headaches for hospital IT management due to an increased load on the HIS.
An HIS consists of an integrated set of Web applications automating hospital operations. This includes applications managing administrative, financial, clinical, radiology and lab operations. There are usually thousands of different people using this system at any given time. However, despite a large number of users, everybody expects the system to perform well even during peak usage hours.