My wife ambushed me the other weekend and coerced me to commence a spring clean of the home office. This was a painful experience, and I’m sharing it with you because my major recollection of this event is also relevant to healthcare data.
Let me explain…
My photography collection was in a bad state. I’d become interested in photography as a teenager, and when slide film was my preferred medium (since it was cheap). I used it for pursuing my other hobbies, and I would use colour negatives for family photos, and black and white negatives when I was attempting to be artistic. Sadly, in this digital age, my daughters would not comprehend what I am talking about.
Over time, my collection has become degraded – prints have faded, and slides and negatives have become damaged due to extremes of temperature and humidity. I am also certain that many items have been lost between moves over the years.
The collection has also become inaccessible. I no longer have a slide projector and so am relying on a cheap slide viewer. I hold the negatives up to a light, but struggle to recognise the people or occasion, let alone the date.
My archiving technique also left a lot to be desired, and I can reliably inform you that failing to label slides, and just placing packets of photos into shoe boxes will cause you grief in the long term.
Why is my tale of woe relevant to healthcare? It highlights issues that are relevant, and that are easily solved, in this digital age. However, they will only be resolved if we think about it, and take action, now.
The first issue is media. Over the last 30 years we have seen slides and negatives become redundant. The equipment needed to utilise them is now being relegated to museums. The same is happening, and is continuing to happen, with computing media. Paper tape, punch cards, cassettes and Reel to Reel are no longer used. There has been a progression of tape technologies, AIT through to AIT4, 4mm, 8mm, DLT, through to DLT8000 and LTO through to LTO6. Not only do these technologies eventually become obsolete, the tools to read the historic data on their media is lost as well. This is a fact of life, and it’s important therefore, to design systems where archived data can be easily migrated from one technology to another. It’s also important to manage the risk of a technology becoming obsolete, or media being lost or destroyed, by storing copies on different types of media, and in different locations.
The second issue is knowing what information we have, being able to search for it, and access it. This is where indexing file content comes in. Systems must also therefore, have the ability to index a variety of file types. For example, this should include common file types found on a typical file server, the contents of emails and their attachments, and also DICOM data.
Hopefully, you are feeling smug, safe in the knowledge that you have these issues covered. Otherwise, I hope that you can learn from my experiences.
