Client Story
Altera Sunrise™ and Microsoft Azure Get San Gorgonio Hospital in Peak Health Again
First aid for EHR, stat
Hospitals are complex life and death environments, with accurate administration and healthcare record-keeping essential for effective patient care and meeting the data requirements of state and regulatory bodies.
Even though it's a small, 79-bed district hospital with a pharmacy and laboratory, San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital has a busy emergency department, serves a growing community, and reports to the same state, accrediting, and regulatory bodies as much larger hospitals do. It is also answerable to its constituents, who expect transparency about funding and expenditure.
While the hospital had an electronic health records (EHR) system, its existing system was too costly to maintain and had become obsolete, compromising the facility and its patients.
Improved customer satisfaction
Significant reduction in fraud and financial wastage
Secure, flexible, always-on cloud-based system
Diagnosing what was needed
When he joined as the hospital's CEO, Steve Barron was faced with several challenges, including having to select a new electronic healthcare records system. Through a competitive bid process, he needed to find a costeffective system that didn't require big capital outlay and that didn't need the support of a large technical team.
"The hospital needed a user-friendly, easy-to-learn, fast, secure, and reliable system that would always be online, so that patient care would never be compromised," Barron says. "It is simply unacceptable for healthcare professionals to make mistakes on patient care because data is not available due to ransomware threats or because the server is down."
The hospital also needed a system that could help reduce costs, improve collections, and maintain a positive cash flow-all while giving clinicians, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and lab technicians the tools they need to spend less time on administration and more time meeting patients' needs.
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Choosing the treatment plan
San Gorgonio chose Altera Digital Health's Sunrise, a complete, managed, and cloud-deployed EHR system with a pre-built turnkey-supported solution deployed on Microsoft Azure. provides ongoing system configuration and maintenance, the design and building of interfaces, and testing and training to ensure that the solution is always up to date.
The EHR system reduces clinicians' administrative burden with intuitive workflows and a single patient record, providing quick access to comprehensive patient data and financial records that improve patient and hospital outcomes.
San Gorgonio is also hosting Sunrise through Azure, which enables the hospital to instantly leverage new functionalities as they become available while reducing on-premises infrastructure expenses.
A healthy outcome
"The fact that Sunrise on Azure is on a long-term lease and that all upgrades are included were standout features for San Gorgonio," Barron explains. "Having one contract to handle the system has already paid for itself in reduced costs and improved debt collections, and we're now able to respond accurately to the state of California's specific reporting requirements.
"We now have the tools we need to work more efficiently, and we have access to the data we need to analyze events and outcomes, so that we can focus on improving the quality of our patient care."
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