New whitepaper outlines challenges and best practices around building a healthcare data archive

HC2011, The ICC Birmingham and Woburn, MA, USA - 6th April 2011 - BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data and storage management, today released a new whitepaper entitled “Strategies to Reduce the Costs of Managing Healthcare Data” available for download at http://bit.ly/fC3bDm.


Charles MallioIt is generally accepted that healthcare data is growing at an exponential rate. This largely stems from the move towards the Electronic Patient Record, initiatives to go ‘paperless’ and the retroactive scanning of patient documents; the rise in the volume and size of clinical images; and the general files created from office and administration applications such as email and spreadsheets. This data upsurge creates a number of challenges for hospitals.

Healthcare IT needs to provide increased storage capacity as existing infrastructures cannot easily accommodate such large data volumes. Storage silos have resulted in a general under-utilization of resources; and a large degree of redundancy is often found in primary storage devices. Provision for retention management and compliance policies directly impacts the patient information lifecycle where data is often stored from anywhere between 5 years to permanently. How can this vast quantity of data be protected? With the move towards centralized electronic patient records, data interoperability and information exchange is more important to hospitals than ever. And all this while IT budgets are shrinking, yet everyone is expected to ‘do more with less’. It’s clear that traditional approaches to managing and storing this data no longer apply.

“For hospitals, the ‘keep everything’ strategy and the short-term tactic of ‘throwing more disk at it’ are quickly losing appeal and are arguably no longer applicable, proving both costly and unsustainable in the long term,” said Charles Mallio, Vice President, Product Strategy & Business Development of BridgeHead Software. “We advocate a new approach, challenging some of the traditional ideas around healthcare data and storage management. The foundation to our approach is to create a central repository for all static, unchanging data.”

The whitepaper offers practical advice to hospitals on how to leverage the strengths of data archiving to assist in: eliminating storage silos; optimizing storage assets; enabling data interoperability; ensuring full data protection and providing a quick return on investment - all in a bid to put the healthcare IT professional back in control of their data and storage.

The whitepaper states the optimal way to do this is to create a centralized repository that will accommodate around 80 per cent of all healthcare data (which BridgeHead Software has determined is static i.e. unchanging and with only a 2% chance of being accessed again).

The paper advocates further suggestions as to the requirements of a successful healthcare archive:

Optimization of storage assets
This centralized repository should have the ability to intelligently store data and leverage the mix of media assets available in the hospital. This includes reserving the highest cost storage assets - typically fiber channel disk in a storage area network - for the organization’s active, dynamic data and managing static data on more cost effective media, such as lower cost disk, optical, tape or even cloud.
 
Data interoperability
In order to maximize the full benefits of the rich healthcare data available, the appropriate data standards must be adopted so that information can be passed seamlessly between applications and storage alike. Therefore, it is important that the chosen archiving solution adheres to healthcare standards such as HL7, DICOM and XDS.

Data protection
The healthcare archiving solution must provide safeguards against data loss and security breaches, and should include multiple copy, data replication, encryption and digital fingerprinting authentication capabilities.

Return on investment
A healthcare archive should result in savings from delayed storage refreshes, fewer hardware investments and the ability to migrate data, as needed, to lowest cost storage.

“The healthcare data and storage management problem is not going away,” continues Mallio. “We hope this whitepaper will give IT professionals ‘food for thought’ as to how they can address their current issues whilst building a platform for the future data growth predicted.”

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