A significant change is underway in the healthcare industry. Information is being used more effectively to
improve the quality of patient care and the efficiency of end-to-end operations. Instead of separate data and
applications for core functions (clinical care, admitting, billing, regulatory compliance, etc.), organizations
are consolidating data, integrating applications and mobilizing client devices so information is available
when, where and how it is needed to most efficiently perform diverse functions.

These changes are essential to control rising healthcare costs and to improve the accuracy and availability
of information, yet they place heavy demands on the underlying computing infrastructure. Core IT systems
and applications must be highly scalable to support rapidly growing workloads, resilient to ensure critical
medical information is always available to those who require it, and flexible enough to adapt quickly as
requirements grow. They must also be cost-effective and easily managed, so that the advantages of
increased operational efficiency are not offset by excessive IT expenditures.

Itanium-based servers are ideal for these demanding requirements. They offer the high-end scalability and
availability of traditional RISC and mainframe systems, but without the technology and vendor constraints
of those proprietary architectures. Itanium-based servers support more than 10 different operating systems
(including Windows, Linux and UNIX) and over 13,000 applications, which makes it easy to integrate them
into almost any computing environment. They are also available in large, mainframe-class systems that
scale-up easily to support multi-terabyte databases and high volume transactional applications capable of
serving thousands of simultaneous users.

Itanium-based servers are already supporting core applications for some of today’s largest and most
successful healthcare providers and research institutions. As computing demands continue to grow,
Itanium-based systems will be increasingly valuable assets for scaling and adapting core applications and
managing rapidly expanding data volumes.

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