Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has always been committed to help improve the economy and health of residents in developing countries through the transfer of agricultural technology and volunteer healthcare clinics. Taoyuan Hospital is one of the advocates behind these efforts. As early as 2013, Taoyuan Hospital identified problems such as unstable power supplies and poor information infrastructures in developing countries and proposed the concept of the Taiwan HIS (Healthcare information System) Alliance to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The hospital hoped to integrate the resources of Taiwan's solar power industry, medical industry and information industry in the creation of a medical information system that can operate for 36 hours during a power outage to secure the quality of medical care.
This project achieved good results in Haiti. The ASUS TS300-E8-PS4 workstation and the ASUS RS300-E8-PS4 server were extremely stable and played important roles in the success of the project. Thus, after the Executive Yuan began promoting its New Southbound Policy, which aims to enhance corporation between Taiwan and other countries in the region, Taoyuan Hospital decided to further cooperate with ASUS to promote the HIS Alliance program in Myanmar to improve the quality of medical services for local people. During the development of the HIS system, ASUS also provided diverse assistance to ensure that the HIS system would operate smoothly on the ASUS TS300-E8-PS4 workstation and ASUS RS300-E8-PS4 server.
"We decided to work with ASUS because the company's technical support is superior to other brands. That lets us focus on developing the HIS system and making the process smoother. For example, ASUS modified the firmware parameters of the hardware devices to fit the characteristics of the HIS system. We sincerely appreciate the full attention and care they gave to this project."
- Ming-Yi Huang, Director of Taoyuan Hospital
The ASUS TS300-E8-PS4 server used in the HIS Alliance project is an entry-level, upright workstation that uses the same high-stability components as the rackmount server. In idle mode, the sound level is as low as 27dB, which is much lower than the noise emitted by a projector (average 42dB). Since the system supports Intel® Xeon® E3 series processors, it can also be used as an entry-level server for companies without data centers.
The ASUS RS300-E8-PS4 server can operate stably at high temperatures of 40° C, making it the first choice for many companies in Taiwan. More importantly, the servers are equipped with 80 PLUS Gold power supplies, which can reduce power loss and power consumption. This makes it suitable for operating in remote areas where power supplies may be unstable.
Shun-Ping Cheng, Dean of Taoyuan Hospital, said, "The stability of the server is one of the key factors to the success of the Taiwan HIS Alliance program. The HIS system is an important platform for hospital operations. It can help establish local medical procedures that meet international standards. It can also convert paper medical records scattered in storage rooms into reusable electronic medical records, allowing us to provide better medical services. In the Haiti project, the ASUS server ran very stably, so we are quite confident in extending this plan to Myanmar."
The Taiwan HIS Alliance program is a long-term, wide-ranging medical assistance program. Taoyuan Hospital hopes to cooperate with the New Southbound Policy so that Myanmar's medical services receive the same improvements and enjoy success similar to what was achieved in Haiti, becoming a model for other Southeast Asian countries in the future.
"Considering the poor basic environment in remote countries, the server not only needs to be stable, but also needs to have powerful computing power to run multiple application modules. ASUS provided high-performance processors and large amounts of memory for the HIS Alliance program to realize those ideas. Moreover, the ASUS server consumes very little power and can operate for up to 36 hours in a limited environment of only eight hours of viable solar power generation, which is very surprising to the hospital teams in Taiwan and Haiti."
- Hou-Chaung Chen, International Health Center Director
