Due to the proliferation of data in hospital environments, the challenge IT managers face right now is to balance storage cost versus clinical performance. Recently, BridgeHead’s Solutions Consultant, Shaun Smale, explored this subject further and the resulting research was featured in the publication StorageNewsletter.
The article sheds more light on hospital data management, redundancies and inefficiencies in data storage, and the implications around the UK’s National Program for IT (NPfIT). Key findings include:
- Strategically managing all healthcare data, across all storage media types, is the most efficient way to control and drive down storage costs
- Storing inactive data (with a very low probability of ever being viewed again) on expensive SAN services is not cost effective for Trusts or the taxpayer – cheaper disk systems, tape and/or Cloud should be looked at instead
- Clinical data, in active use, should be kept on high performance SAN, whether it is a database, raw data for number crunching (such as genome sequencing), or unreported DICOM images from one or more departments
- BridgeHead's Healthcare Data Management (HDM) solution can be configured so that each file can be individually managed. This means that a copy can be stored on the most appropriate media based on the probability of it being required by a clinician.
Ultimately, hard choices and intelligent decisions will be required to maximise efficiency and reduce storage costs of all healthcare data to improve clinical performance and patient care. To read the full article click here.
