By Tim Kaschinske | @TimKaschinske
When selecting any software technology, it’s always important to understand the products return on investment (ROI). This is especially true for a technology such as an Enterprise Archive, as it has an impact on all areas of the healthcare enterprise. So what is the ROI for an Enterprise Archive?
Often, the discussion of ROI for an Enterprise Archive focuses on the ability of the archive to use different storage ‘tiers’ based upon the age and usage patterns of the data. The idea is that the most recent and most often used data is stored on the most expensive storage (such as SAN-attached), while older and less frequently used data is stored on less expensive storage (such as NAS), and the oldest and least frequently used data is stored on the least expensive storage (like tape or cloud).
Focusing on tiered storage for ROI can be misleading: The benefits of more efficiently managing your expensive storage are real, but are often hidden when large amounts of the lesser expensive storage must be acquired to implement the archive.
As a better measure of ROI, I suggest examining the ‘enterprise’ nature of an Enterprise Archive. It is common at many healthcare enterprises that departments have different, unrelated solutions to archive data. Radiology and Cardiology often have DICOM archives for storing medical images. Medical records departments often have archiving solutions for scanned documents. Different technologies are also available for other departments, such as pathology, sleep studies, endoscopy, and more recently, genetic data. Each department archive system will have its own user interface, its own hardware and storage requirements, and its own method of protecting the archived data. This requires IT staff to be trained on each of these systems, and often the organization must have experts for each of them.
This siloed approach is very costly: storage must be managed independently and is typically under-utilized. Even more significantly, IT resources are dedicated to different solutions for the same task, archiving, but without the ability to leverage skill and experience from one system to another.
Adopting an Enterprise Archive that is capable of archiving data from any department simplifies this scenario greatly. IT staff working with an Enterprise Archive approach, have only one user interface to learn, one set of hardware and storage requirements to understand, and one method of protecting the data. Simplifying the archive environment in this way results in productivity gains as IT staff are freed up to do other tasks. Studies have shown that the increase in productivity for IT staff is significant when a single application is chosen to implement a single task across the enterprise.
One such advantage was published by BridgeHead in a recent customer ROI study. In the figure, the five-year cumulative benefit in terms of productivity improvements along with avoidance of downtime, was calculated to represent $304K in cost avoidance.
When selecting an Enterprise Archive approach, you can gain the best ROI advantage by avoiding selecting technologies that are really only designed to archive a specific type of data. Instead, consider those Enterprise Archive technologies that are truly ‘enterprise’ and can archive all of your hospital data.
If you are interested in learning more, I will be presenting a webinar on this topic in a few weeks, along with our partner HealthDynamix, on May 22. Please register and attend the webinar. Or, you can reach out to me on Twitter or through the BridgeHead Software web site.
