BridgeHead CEO says Vendor-Agnostic Healthcare Data Management (HDM) and Healthcare Storage Virtualization (HSV) Can Make IT Managers’ EPR Resiliency Dreams a Reality

World of Health IT, Barcelona – 15th March 2010 – Preliminary results from the BridgeHead Software Data Management Healthcheck survey suggest health IT managers are looking for resilient solutions for managing their electronic patient record (EPR) systems that can grow and evolve as their organisations’ storage needs change over time.

Respondents to the survey, which is still underway at http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com/hdm-survey, said their top three spending priorities for the next 12 months were backup (including business continuity and disaster recovery) (46.2%), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS, 38.5%), and archiving (36.5%). Other answer choices included digitizing paper records (34.6%), server virtualization (30.8%), storage virtualization (19.2%), cloud storage (11.5%) and green IT (7.7%).

Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software, said the results indicated “a professional understanding of the complexities of migrating from paper to electronic patient records in the modern healthcare environment. Backup and archiving are fundamental to any data management strategy, so it’s clear that health IT managers are doing their homework before starting the EPR migration process.”

Cotterill added that BridgeHead Software’s vendor-agnostic healthcare data management (HDM) and healthcare storage virtualization (HSV) suite has helped over 1,000 hospitals take control of their data by creating fully integrated and interoperable platforms for viewing and accessing electronic patient records.

“Healthcare storage virtualization [HSV] helps hospitals realise the full potential of electronic patient records systems because HSV empowers hospitals to meet their growing storage needs without compromising on current hardware brand or media type,” explained Cotterill. “HSV separates applications from the storage device, allowing multiple applications to tap into the same resources and increasing overall utilization of the storage resource.”

Cotterill added, “Vendor-agnostic solutions for HDM and HSV free hospitals to negotiate better service contracts on better terms with their application and storage vendors, hence making the most of their current storage infrastructure and systems investments.”

Preliminary findings from the Data Management Healthcheck also confirmed the existence of a growing healthcare data burden. A majority of respondents said they expected their data volumes to increase by up to 25 percent over the next year, and a whopping 90 percent said over half of the data contained within their organisations was over six months old.
 
“Although backup is one of the keys to an effective and efficient data management strategy, it is by no means a catch-all solution,” said Cotterill. “The integrated, vendor-agnostic HDM and HSV approach puts hospitals back in control of their clinical data, freeing them from supposed obligations to their imaging and storage vendors while enabling them to deliver quicker, more efficient, and better informed healthcare at the same time as reducing costs within the hospital.”