UPMC Honored for Innovative Technology Spending as No. 49 on Informationweek 500 Annual Ranking
PITTSBURGH, September 19, 2008 — The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s environmentally friendly technology practices have helped it to earn recognition as one of this year’s InformationWeek 500 honorees. UPMC ranked No. 49 on the list, up from No. 105 last year. For two decades, the magazine has identified the nation’s most innovative users of information technology across all industries with its annual listing.
The 500 companies were revealed at a gala awards ceremony this week during the InformationWeek 500 conference in Monarch Beach, Calif., and are featured in the Sept. 15 issue of InformationWeek magazine. UPMC has made the list every year since 2002. To be ranked, companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue “must prove that they’re spending IT dollars in innovative ways,” according to the magazine.
UPMC’s IT organization was lauded for significant gains in productivity and cost savings achieved through its sweeping virtualization and data center consolidation initiatives. As part of its environmental sustainability initiatives, the health system realized a 50 percent productivity improvement and cost savings of more than $22 million by optimizing processing power, memory, network traffic and storage utilization. Server consolidation alone is expected to return more than 1,600 square feet of space in the main data center, while significantly reducing power use. UPMC’s centralization of printing, copying and scanning services will reduce physical printers from 13,000 to 4,000 and result in savings, including paper consumption, of approximately 30 percent over seven years.
“At UPMC, our technology group is always focused on the organization’s core mission of providing high-quality, cost-efficient health care. The innovative use of technology is key to achieving that vision at home and around the world,” said Chief Information Officer Dan Drawbaugh.
UPMC has long been recognized as a leader in using technology to improve patient care and productivity. It has been named one of the 100 Most Wired hospitals and health systems in the United States by Hospitals & Health Networks, the journal of the American Hospital Association, for 10 consecutive years. It also was recently named one of the Top 25 Connected Healthcare Facilities by Health Imaging & IT, based on such factors as the ability of physicians to access electronic images and the percentage of imaging studies completed on digital imaging systems.
UPMC is an integrated global health enterprise headquartered in Pittsburgh and one of the leading nonprofit health systems in the United States. As western Pennsylvania’s largest employer, with 50,000 employees and $7 billion in revenue, UPMC is transforming the economy of the region into one based on medicine, research and technology. By integrating 20 hospitals, 400 doctors’ offices and outpatient sites, long-term care facilities, and a major insurance plan, UPMC has advanced the quality and efficiency of health care and developed internationally renowned programs in transplantation, cancer, neurosurgery, psychiatry, orthopaedics and sports medicine, among others. UPMC is commercializing its medical and technological expertise by nurturing new companies, developing strategic business relationships with some of the world’s leading multinational corporations and expanding into international markets, including Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Qatar. For more information about UPMC, visit our Web site at www.upmc.com.
To see the top 250 companies in the InformationWeek list, go to http://www.informationweek.com/iw500/2008/top250.