By Brendan O’Leary, Training Development Manager, BridgeHead Software
Last month I shared the pain of spring cleaning the home office. I am now able to report back to you on the benefits that resulted that made it all worthwhile.
Since the spring clean I have become more efficient. It is no longer a struggle to find a file in the filing cabinet. It is no longer a struggle to add another document to a bulging manila folder. I have desk space to work with. I am more efficient because I have reduced the overhead of finding my data, clearing a working area, and then filing my completed work.
I have achieved this state of grace by managing my storage.
The major storage issue in my home office is dealing with paper. I am sure you will be familiar with the standard documents that need to be filed regularly: bank statements, credit card statements, utility bills, pay slips…. the list goes on. Then there are the other documents, which are rarely used, but that still need to be accessible when I need them, such as passports, insurance documents and wills.
Over time, the collection of standard documents continues to grow. But I have only limited room in my office, so resolving the storage issue by buying an additional filing cabinet is not an option. Even if it was an option, it is an expensive option that does not address the underlying problems. It might not even help me work more efficiently.
The best solution, though painful, was to analyse the data I was storing. I needed to determine whether I really needed to keep particular documents. If I did need to keep them, then did they really belong in the office filing system? Or could I store them in boxes in the loft? This analysis led to the creation of a set of simple rules to help me make these decisions:
- If the document was no longer relevant, toss it away. This rule was refined to state what defined a ‘relevant’ document. My wife and I decided that bank statements older than 7 years and pay slips older than 1 year were no longer relevant
- If the document was not likely to be used, but had to be kept for other reasons, then store it in a box in the loft. Tax records, for example, fell into this category. So did bank statements older than 1 year
- The remaining documents were allowed to stay in the office filing cabinet.
The biggest problem with this system was agreeing the relevance of a document. I am a sentimentalist and, consequently, find it hard to toss out the children’s old school reports and other tokens from bygone days. I am also the type of person who keeps things because ‘they might be useful one day’. On the other hand, my wife is a pragmatist. As you can imagine, spring cleaning at the O’Leary household can be a fraught affair. You will be pleased to hear that we managed to achieve a compromise.
The same principles and problems we found in this domestic example equally apply to maintaining the efficiency and management of digital data storage in healthcare organisations. Hospital systems will encounter less overhead if we keep our storage under control. Ideally, we will have an area of cheap storage, analogous to the loft, for managing data that must be kept, but is rarely used.
The first problem is deciding what files are relevant and how they should be stored. This is a likely source of contention between those departments that are responsible for providing the storage and those that use it. Analysing the data is a good place to commence. I suggest that you start with some simple analysis, such as how much data has not been accessed over ‘x’ number of years or months? I would not be surprised if it is about 80% of your hospital’s fileserver. Most users may be shocked at this result. So, is it worth trolling through a fileserver to carry out this analysis? The simple answer is ‘yes’! There is an ‘easy to use’ tool, ‘FileScan’, that can be downloaded from our website, that will do the hard work for you. Imagine how happy IT would be to reclaim 80% of prime storage.
However, the users will probably put up a fight. They will have valid concerns, such as: there is a legal obligation to keep the data; I might need one of those files someday; an application requires the files in that folder. This is where knowledge of the benefits of an archiving solution is required, but that is a topic for another day.
