Big Data is in the press a lot at the moment. However, ‘Big Data’ means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Within healthcare, the digitisation of patient records, combined with the emergence of electronic medical records (EMRs), has meant that the volume and size of medical images and other patient data has grown exponentially. In fact the US research organisation, Frost & Sullivan, estimates that picture archiving and communication system (PACS) storage requirements in the US grew at a rate of more than 20% per year for the past five years, and reached 27,000 Terabytes in 2011. A UK report by the Centre of Economics and Business Research and SAS in April last year also predicted a similar explosion of data in the UK, stating that they expect data equity to reach £40.7 billion by 2017! Compounded by Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that the NHS should be paperless by 2018, this data explosion is only going to accelerate.
So in this new world of ‘Big Data’, how are hospitals coping with data protection? BridgeHead’s 2011 International Healthcare Data Management Survey found that 65% of healthcare IT leaders said that their data volumes had increased over the previous year, and 54.6% had disaster recovery and data backup as one of the top IT issues requiring attention. This makes sense, since with the essential use of data in the provision of patient care; the systems and processes that are required to manage it; disaster recovery; and the back up and archive of hospital information system (HIS) data, this is becoming an increasingly important and strategic decision. Our survey also revealed that only 26% of hospitals have a tried-and-tested disaster recovery strategy in place. This is concerning since we see stories regularly in the press that talk about data being lost. This problem is only going to become more frequent and problematic if steps aren’t taken to protect the ever increasing volumes of hospital data.
Some hospitals are taking note. UPMC Beacon Hospital is a good example. They recently upgraded their HIS, and so took the opportunity to implement a data protection software solution that would provide backup and recovery of all their clinical and administrative data stored on the HIS. It’s only by taking steps like these that hospitals will be able to guarantee delivery of the level of care that patients expect, and provide peace of mind that critical patient information is always going to be available to those that need it, when they need it.
