By Mike Ball
In my conversations with hospital CIOs around the country, I often discuss an intangible that I think is of general interest and importance to understand: Why does BridgeHead do what it does?
I’ve realized something that is at the core of everything we do here: BridgeHead provides independent software for healthcare data management that allows hospital IT organizations to gain and maintain freedom of investment choice. We believe that application and storage technology should never dictate IT strategy.
I have lost count of the number of hospitals that have made less than ideal IT procurement decisions because they are locked in to a particular storage vendor. Too often, hospitals feel compelled to commit disproportionate expenditure on larger and larger storage systems. Hospitals should be free to store data wherever and however they find it to be most efficient and cost-effective for their needs – without compromising security and without compromising access to the data for clinicians.
We believe that providing “storage-agnostic” healthcare data management solutions is one compelling reason that hospitals work with us.
The same logic applies to EHR and PACS applications. Hospitals should be free to choose solutions that work best for their clinicians and workflow processes without denying IT the ability to protect the data that is collected. A true VNA solution can help achieve this. Upgrading applications or switching vendors can be difficult and time-consuming. But it does not have to be.
We believe that providing “application-agnostic” healthcare data management solutions is another compelling reason that hospitals work with us.
BridgeHead exists to help hospitals gain and maintain their technology independence – on storage, on network and system infrastructure, and on their choice of workflow applications. BridgeHead believes that hospitals must have freedom of choice on all of the most important aspects of selecting and designing hospital infrastructure to maximize clinical efficiency and patient outcomes.
We do this by making sure that all the data in the hospital is collected and stored securely, protected effectively and shared appropriately.
In those conversations with CIOs and IT directors, I find that there is an incredible match of the core values which drive our activities here at BridgeHead Software and those which drive a healthy IT strategy.
Among those of you that I’ve had the pleasure to get to know, it is clearly of paramount importance to be able to demonstrate that your department is doing what it must to serve clinicians, to serve patients, and to meet your obligations for your hospital and community. Typically this comes down to three recurring themes:
- Provide systems and solutions that support delivery of excellent patient care
- Help the hospital achieve better business results by driving costs down
- Measure and report on health IT activities that support compliance and identify areas for ongoing improvement
Maintaining independence in health IT is a core requirement for achieving these goals. BridgeHead makes sure that your data is always available, always protected and never locked into storage and applications that you use.
