The View - March

News and Notes

3rd Annual Ride for Hope is scheduled for Friday, May 5 from 11:30 - 1:30. Vendor and cyclist ticket registration can be found here.

Next Open Forum is scheduled for April 21 in the Multi-purpose Room of the Main Center.

Program Highlight: RIDGEVIEW Information Services
Technology with a Mission.

The Ridgeview IT (Information Technology) department is based out of the Main Center in Oak Ridge, TN. I am exceptionally proud of my team whose mission is to serve each Ridgeview employee with outstanding customer service and reliable information services. We strive to provide effective technology tools to all Ridgeview staff, because each of us either directly or indirectly provide valuable healthcare to the community we are privileged to serve.

Ridgeview IT Team photographed at right: front row, Brian Elton and Misty Gosnell; back row, Shane Neer and Michael Parker!

Over 3 years ago, Ridgeview embarked on a journey to implement a new EHR (Electronic Health Record) called PsychConsult. Thanks to the hard work, long hours, and perseverance of the entire EHR implementation team including Traci May, Randy Hanna, Debi Colvais, Mary Claire Duff, Nathan Zeiger and dedicated staff who were committed to making it a success, we are almost completely electronic!

The benefits of an EHR combined with Telehealth are countless. For Ridgeview, it is the conduit to provide our services across 5 counties more effectively by having immediate access to a comprehensive medical record, more efficiently by eliminating the need to manually pull paper records and transport them, and with less errors by eliminating hand-written notes.

The EHR and general computer access for staff is primarily delivered via “The Farm” which is based on Microsoft RDS (Remote Desktop Services). The server farm consists of several servers, and logins are automatically equally distributed across multiple servers so that workload on each server is balanced. It also provides the flexibility to take one or more servers offline for maintenance without affecting access to the farm.

Traditionally, organizations needed many physical servers to provide core functionality such as email, applications, files, and print servers. Today, Ridgeview operates on 100% virtualized servers. Virtualization, as it is used by Ridgeview, is the ability to run many “Windows Servers” that share a centralized pool of processors, memory, and storage. There are many benefits of virtualization such as energy savings, physical footprint, increased availability, improved disaster recovery, faster server provisioning, and the flexibility to quickly create servers for testing. Server virtualization has allowed Ridgeview to grow from having about 10 servers with less than a terabyte of storage just 3 years ago, to now having nearly 50 servers and over 40 terabytes of storage, all while using less space, less energy, and with improved reliability & performance.

Ridgeview has realized significant cost reductions and obtained affordable enterprise-class IT resources through leveraging virtualization, Voice-Over-IP, the TN State contract with Verizon, Microsoft non-profit pricing, the Rural Healthcare Connect Fund, and relentless price negotiating.

The Ridgeview information system infrastructure has redundancy in almost every area possible – servers, storage, power, cooling, Internet connections, and backups. Redundancy means that if any of these systems fail, a secondary system automatically engages without disrupting Ridgeview’s servers. In fact, these systems are engaged at least monthly due to testing, brief power outages, and Internet connection outages without anyone ever noticing. Just recently, as part of Ridgeview’s Disaster Recovery Plan, servers are backed up to an offsite location in Chattanooga. In the event of a catastrophic system failure in Oak Ridge, all systems would be online shortly.

Exciting projects are underway to provide staff with new tools to find and share information, collaborate on projects, and communicate with one another. Stay tuned!

We are here to HELP!
Web: http://HELP
Phone: HELP (x4357)

Crisis Intervention Team celebrates twenty graduates!

The East Tennessee Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) completed forty hours of training during March 6 through March 10. The twenty graduates included representation from the following agencies: Oak Ridge Police Department, Anderson County Sheriff's Office, Rocky Top, and Blount Memorial Hospital. Participants receive valuable communication skills to support their ability to interact with individuals who may be experiencing an acute psychiatric episode or have a co-occurring disorder. Classroom lecture, touring community resources, advanced verbal techniques, complex crisis intervention strategies, and role plays are part of the standardized curriculum. Board of Directors President-elect, Ben Redmond, joins the celebration to recognize the recent graduates.

A special thanks to the ET CIT Task Force, the guest lecturers, the role play participants, and to Roane State Community College for use of their classroom space.

Ridgeview makes presence known during Mental Health Day on the Hill

Ridgeview's Psychosocial Rehabilitation programming and Peer Support Center members visit legislators to advocate for strong mental health policy and treatment for mental illness and co-occurring disorders. Below left: Cornerstone meets with Senator Ken Yager. Below right: Ridgeview and Oak Ridge NAMI meet with Lt. Governor Randy McNally.