February 2024
Healthcare Data Matters
Welcome to the inaugural edition of our global newsletter, “Healthcare Data Matters”, your go-to source for the latest in hot topics, industry insights, and exciting developments from BridgeHead Software. In each edition, we will feature our latest news and blogs, our ‘customer corner’ (a chance for our amazing customers to showcase their successes), product updates, upcoming events, and more. We hope you find the newsletter useful and informative.
Blog, PR & News
Arming the healthcare enterprise for cyberattack risk mitigation
Cyberattack Mitigation (Global)
In healthcare, planned and unplanned outages are common, but cyberattacks pose unique challenges. Unlike routine disruptions, cyberattacks are unpredictable and can cripple hospital operations for days and, in some cases, months. Isolating networks is the immediate response, but adapting to non-digital workflows introduces risk. In this first in a new series of blogs on cybersecurity, Steve Matheson, Product Manager for BridgeHead’s RAPid™ Data Protection solutions, discusses system outages, their repercussions for healthcare organizations, and what makes cyberattacks different. He also introduces BridgeHead’s new three-point plan to arm healthcare enterprises to mitigate the impact of a successful cyber intrusion. Read the full blog here.
How is your hospital protecting its Linux workloads?
RAPid (Global)
In this blog, Steve Matheson, Product Manager for BridgeHead’s RAPid™ Data Protection solutions, takes a closer look at the burgeoning use of Linux across the healthcare enterprise. Steve examines some of the key distinctions between Windows and Linux when it comes to backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity in the event of a system outage, corruption, natural disaster, or cyberattack. Read the full blog here.
What are your legacy applications costing you? (Pt. 1)
Application Retirement (Global)
In healthcare, legacy applications cost! In the first of this two-part blog, John McCann, VP of Global Marketing, defines legacy applications and delves into the financial impact of supporting and managing them. Read the blog post.
What are your legacy applications costing you? (Pt. 2)
Application Retirement (Global)
In part two, John McCann explores the softer, often overlooked costs of legacy applications, such as security vulnerabilities, staff burnout, the strain on IT, compliance hurdles, and interoperability challenges. Read the blog post.
Cyberattack protection – don’t miss the obvious!
RAPid (Global)
In this blog, we explore key themes around backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity in healthcare, with practical advice on how hospitals can leverage technologies they already have to insure themselves against a cyberattack. Read the blog post.
“What has a FHIR repository ever done for us?”
Interoperability (Global)
In this humorous blog, Adam Coombes, BridgeHead’s HealthStore® Product Owner, explores the value of a FHIR repository, highlighting open standards, cybersecurity, and interoperability benefits. Read the blog post.
The 21st Century Cures Act & how it may affect your legacy clinical applications
Application Retirement (Global)
Learn more about the 21st Century Cures Act’s and the Information Blocking Rule, the obligations and impacts for healthcare providers – especially concerning data trapped in legacy applications. Read the blog post.
Fewer applications mean more secure healthcare environments
Application Retirement (Global)
BridgeHead’s Jamie Clifton shares his insights on cyber crime in healthcare highlighting the need to reduce the attack surface by decommissioning legacy applications whilst leveraging the valuable data they contain. Read the blog post.
BridgeHead Software awarded on to new National Legacy Information Integration and Management Framework Agreement
Press Release (UK&I)
BridgeHead Software has been awarded on to the new National Framework Agreement for Legacy Information Integration and Management. What does this mean for our customers? Read full press release here.
Product Information
This section provides the latest product updates regarding BridgeHead’s HealthStore® Clinical Data Repository and RAPid™ Data Protection solutions.
HealthStore® 23R3 Release
Product Release Notice (Global)
The latest HealthStore release, HS 23R3, puts the finishing touches on the ability for HealthStore to manage data in a FHIR repository. This initiative builds on HealthStore’s support for multiple healthcare data standards, such as HL7, DICOM, XDSi/b and more; enabling management of a wide array of both images and documents. The FHIR repository extends these capabilities so that HealthStore can now ingest discrete data, such as laboratory results; and, furthermore, allows data to be queried from HealthStore using the FHIR protocol.
With HS 23R3, HealthStore can now accept HL7 messages containing numeric lab results, text (such as radiology reports, histology results, and discharge letters), or a combination of both, and store them in HealthStore’s FHIR repository. For more information, check out the recent blog from Adam Coombes, HealthStore Product Owner, titled: “What has a FHIR repository ever done for us?”.
RAPid 23A SP2 Release
Product Release Notice (Global)
BridgeHead is excited to announce the latest release of our RAPid™ Data Protection solution, RAPid 23A SP2. This release focused on two main areas.
1) Features for ‘Scaling Up’
As we are seeing many of our customers ‘scaling up’ their RAPid deployments to cover an ever-increasing data footprint, the first thing we did was develop enhanced features that enable consumers of RAPid to create metadata and unique identifiers. This metadata is useful for tracking activity in multi-tenanted environments and includes associating resources usage and cost accounting, and grouping specific customer RAPid objects and servers together for reporting.
We also extended the capabilities of BridgeHead’s FileStore™ to support multi-site, multi-domain configurations. This feature set enables policy-based file management in a ‘hub and spoke’ arrangement, including:
- Multiple FileStore installations sharing a common database (onsite or Cloud-based)
- Each ‘spoke’ has its own services; and so can operate independently if others are down
- Data archived at a ‘spoke’ can also be copied to the hub
- Local storage protection and space management at ‘spokes’
- A central reference and secondary site for all data.
As a result, health IT departments can now provide a single file management framework across all ‘spoke’ sites, while creating an aggregated data environment at the ‘hub’. This is especially useful for recovery from cyberattacks as well as content indexing.
2) Added Linux Support
The second area of focus addresses customer’s requests for expanded support of third-party, complimentary Linux-based solutions. As a result, the latest release of RAPid offers support for the Linux-based Zerto ZVM Appliance. ZVM Appliance is a Zerto Virtual Manager that runs on a secure Linux operating system, allowing customers to minimize the attack surface related to Zerto. RAPid brings the same level of integration and support for this product as it does for the Windows-based Zerto offering.
Services & Support Information
Outsourcing your BridgeHead data protection environment
With protection and recovery of healthcare applications and data continuing to be a top priority for hospitals, and with healthcare IT departments increasingly stretched constantly having to ‘do more with less’, we are seeing an increase in customer requests to take advantage of BridgeHead’s Platinum Maintenance service.
Platinum Maintenance enables customers to effectively outsource the management of their RAPid™ Data Protection solution, leveraging BridgeHead’s industry experts to take care of their BridgeHead backups and archiving – saving time and resource, while safeguarding their critical healthcare data.
Video: Cherry County Hospital’s journey to Platinum Maintenance
Services (Global)
After utilizing BridgeHead’s RAPid™ Data Protection solution for almost a decade, Cherry County Hospital added BridgeHead’s Platinum Maintenance service for worry-free, outsourced backup and disaster recovery. Watch this short video (4mins) featuring Cherry County’s CIO, Phillip Mues, describing his journey to Platinum Maintenance.
Customer Corner
Digital Health industry spotlight
Customer Spotlight (UK&I)
Mark Chester, assistant director of technology in digital and data services, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust has been spearheading efforts to move years of legacy data into a future-proofed Clinical Data Repository. Read the full article on the Digital Health website.
Mount Graham Regional Medical Center
Customer Story (North America)
Following recent acquisitions, Mount Graham Regional Medical Center inherited numerous healthcare applications. By implementing BridgeHead’s HealthStore®, Mount Graham was able to extract, consolidate, store, and protect data from these disparate applications; making it available to clinicians and support staff as part of the longitudinal patient record. Those redundant systems could then be decommissioned – saving significant costs and resources whilst reducing the hospital’s cyber attack surface. Read the full story here.
King’s Daughters Medical Center
Press Release (North America)
King’s Daughters Medical Center (KDMC), Mississippi, announces the go-live of independent clinical data repository (CDR), HealthStore®, where the solution was implemented to decommission the hospital’s legacy MEDITECH Magic EHR with almost 700,000 patient records. Read the full press release here.
Upcoming Events & Webinars
It’s events season in health tech, and BridgeHead will be participating in a number of exhibitions and tradeshows in the USA and UK in the coming months – see below for more information. If you are attending any of these, do make sure to swing by and introduce yourself to the team.
We also have an upcoming MUSE webinar on the 5th March entitled “How To Fortify Your Healthcare Data and Applications Against Cyberattacks” – see details below for more information.
Tuesday 5 March: 13:00 – 14:00 ET
(Available to MUSE members only)
How to fortify your healthcare data and applications against cyberattacks
Customer Webinar (US)
Your systems have been breached – you are under attack! Would your confidence be higher if you had reduced your attack surface, minimized the need for manual operations for clinical continuity, and had a proven disaster recovery plan ready to roll out?
Join BridgeHead Software and Armstrong Risk Management on 5th March (13:00-14:00 ET) for an in-depth look into fortifying your resilience against cyberattacks. Register here. (Available to MUSE members only).
Leaving legacy tech behind
Upcoming Event (UK)
BridgeHead Software is the headline sponsor at Convenzis’ “Leaving NHS Legacy Tech Behind” event on Feb 27th at 15 Hatfields, London. Discover how our HealthStore® solution helps healthcare organizations retire outdated applications while preserving their valuable data. Don’t miss the chance to connect with our team! See our events page for more details.
Tuesday 27 February
Tuesday 12 – Wednesday 13 March
Are you attending Rewired 2024? Come & say hello
Upcoming Event (UK)
The UK’s #1 digital health event, Rewired 2024, returns 12-13 March, at the NEC, Birmingham with an unmissable CPD-accredited programme, digital NHS best practice presentations, and multiple networking opportunities. Come & meet the BridgeHead team on Stand H24. See our events page for more information.
Come & visit us at HIMSS 24
Upcoming Event (North America)
BridgeHead will be attending the HIMSS24 Global Health Conference taking place from March 11-15 in Orlando. At the show, we will be featuring in the Interoperability Showcase alongside EPIC, Oracle Cerner, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrating live connectivity between the systems in the support of the cancer care pathway.
You can also find us in the Interoperability Marketplace section, booth #3760, if you are interested in meeting the team or having a HealthStore® demonstration. Lastly, we will be presenting “Don’t panic! Eliminating chaos and restoring order after a cyberattack!” at the Marketplace Spotlight Theater on Wednesday 13th March at 3:15pm. See our events page for more information.
Helpful Resources
In this section, we have compiled a list of resources we hope you will find of use.
Application retirement interview
Video (Global)
In this short video (3mins), BridgeHead discusses the prevalence of legacy applications in healthcare, the challenges they bring and the solutions to address them. Watch the video here.
Webinar: How to tackle the challenges of legacy applications
Customer Webinar (UK&I)
This webinar (38 mins) focuses on how University Hospitals of Derby & Burton NHS Foundation Trust (UHDB) has developed a strategy to tackle the challenges of its legacy application estate. Watch the video here.
HealthStore® animated explainer video
Video (Global)
In this short animated video (2 mins), you will learn how BridgeHead’s Clinical Data Repository, HealthStore®, consolidates, stores, and protects patient, clinical, and administrative data that lives outside of the EHR, whether from live systems or legacy applications. Once in HealthStore, this data can be made available across the healthcare enterprise as part of the longitudinal patient record. View the video here.
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