Costs savings, the creation of operational efficiencies and improving patient care are common themes across the UK healthcare space. Today, hospitals generate ever increasing volumes of data, all in a bid to help successfully manage patient journeys and improve outcomes. At a clinical level, one of the core challenges is ensuring the right data is available to the clinician at the point of care. But, this has to be balanced against the budget to finance such environments, e.g. the cost of storing data. So, reducing costs, whilst ensuring data availability in near real-time, can be a complex conundrum for healthcare providers.
Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WHHFT) has recently taken a more strategic view of its data and is now aiming to take control of its storage costs whilst, at the same time, ensuring clinicians have access to the information they need, when and where they need it.
To make this possible, WHHFT really had to address its data management and storage infrastructure. It did this in the context of trying to solve four key business issues:
- Creating unified data management policies to cope with the multiple new patient care applications it had recently procured, in order that data could be stored, protected and effectively shared to support the delivery of patient care
- Managing the spiralling costs of its storage infrastructure. With various regulatory standards mandating that patient-related data must be kept for a minimum of 7 years, combined with the significant growth in data volumes, associated storage costs would increase unabated. WHHFT needed a tiered approach to its data management whereby regularly accessed data would be available on more expensive tier 1 storage, whereas rarely recalled data would reside on less expensive technology
- Email ‘overload’ was impacting overall server performance. WHHFT needed to consider archiving ‘redundant’ emails and associated files off of the tier 1 devices and onto more cost effective storage to ease the burden on the server environment
- Ensuring the hospital could recover systems in the event of a disaster. Weekly data back ups for application, email and file data were taking the Trust around 52 hours to complete and impacting system performance. The Trust needed to understand which data had changed and, therefore, needed backing up, and which data had remained static, thereby negating the need to make further back ups.
In addressing their challenges, WHHFT chose an email and file archive solution from BridgeHead Software and Dell. Phase 1 of the project will help them to manage existing files, emails, SharePoint sites and data that may be subject to industry or government regulations regarding access and retention. By better profiling and understanding the behaviour of the data it is managing, the Trust can now start to address its storage costs by identifying which data can be moved from more expensive primary storage systems to less expensive environments. The new environment is also designed in a way to enable clinicians to easily search for and quickly recall data when and where it is needed.
Phase 2 of the project will see the adoption of BridgeHead and Dell’s Clinical Archiving Solution, enabling the Trust to further manage and share clinical data, such as medical images.
We’ll keep you up to date on all the latest developments at the Trust but, if you have any questions, please comment below.
