Robust, Secure and Scalable — Premier Heart maintains the highest standards for our infrastructure.

Premier Heart believes that you can not build a strong house without a good foundation. Our infrastructure is based on proven industry solutions and best practices, with a focus on maximizing robustness and security while maintaining excellent performance

Robust

Reliability and speed are crucial to any diagnostic tool, and we have designed our network to minimize downtime while maintaining peak performance under a wide range of conditions.

Our servers are hosted at a leading New York datacenter with N+1 redundancy on power, cooling and network connectivity. The facility has upstream connectivity to several Tier 1 networks to provide optimum speed and stability in the event of network disruptions.

Within the Premier Heart network we maintain N+1 redundancy on all systems, from our edge network through test submission, database storage, diagnosis clusters and report generation. This allows us to tolerate hardware faults and perform most system maintenance without requiring outage windows.

Backups of the patient database and all servers are peformed nightly — in the unlikely event of a catastrophic failure at our main datacenter contingency plans are in place to restore these backups to a temporary site, enabling physicians to continue using the MCG system while measures are taken to resolve the situation.

Secure

The Premier Heart network was engineered with security as a primary design goal. Our security precautions exceed HIPAA requirements in many areas.

The Premier Heart network employs a multiple-ring security model based upon the least access principle, which ensures separation of public-facing and client services and limits the access that can be gained in the unlikely event of a security breach.

Public services, such as the Premier Heart web site and mail servers, are separated from the MCG diagnostic systems, protecting them from attackers. Access to the MCG test submission system and the MCG report generator is further restricted via PKI certificate-based authentication to authorized users, and requires a secure connection.

Sensitive information such as patient identifying information, diagnostic results and other items which fall under the category of Protected Health Information (PHI) under the HIPAA statute is never stored on edge systems, but rather is retrieved as needed from a restricted network accessible only by the test submission and report generation clusters, subject to the access restrictions set by the patient and their physician.

To ensure security of our off-site backups all data is encrypted prior to leaving the original server, with restore keys stored offline at a secure site. The Premier Heart backup media is not usable without the correct restore keys, protecting patients and physicians in the event of theft or compromise of our backup media at the off-site facility.

Scalable

As noted above Premier Heart's operating policy is to maintin N+1 redundancy on all servers. In addition to providing robustness, this also positions us to handle surges in demand: All standby servers are operated as hot standby and are active and participating in their respective clusters. Under normal operating conditions this enables us to handle surges in test volume without delaying the analysis and availability of results.

Periodic evaluation of server performance and workload are performed to determine when additional capacity must be added, and measures are taken to assure quick, efficient operation under all conditions.

Premier Heart also has the capability to add dedicated diagnostic clusters to acommodate clients with high test volume as well as sites with time-critical response such as Emergency Room or Urgent Care facilities. This enables us to balance the needs of each facility while maintaining excellent performance for all of our clients.