The hospital data center — once an onerous operational cost center — is now a critical component in delivering quality patient care, ensuring regulatory compliance, and enabling collaboration among caregivers. Hospital networks today support everything from traditional accounting to highly advanced remote surgery and diagnostic procedures using telemedicine. As use of digital imaging increases logarithmically so does the need to store more and more information — and in a wider variety of formats — that must be accessible in real time. Historically, stakeholder groups for data center projects consisted of information technology, facilities management, and security staff. Today, active participants may include the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Information Officer, compliance managers, sustainability managers, risk management staff, and a variety of physicians and other caregivers.
STRAINING TO KEEP UP WITH GROWTH
Hospitals are burdened by the increasing number of departments and services that are affected by information technology while they face an aging infrastructure. The scale at which a health system needs to increase its data center capacity has never been greater. Some factors include:
BYOD. The necessity to support “bring your own device” mobile technologies is expanding rapidly. Caregivers are already using their mobile devices for video conferencing, accessing online patient data, and as clinical tools to support new apps being developed for everything from diagnosing illnesses, prescribing medications, and even taking a patient’s temperature remotely using infrared technology.
Federal regulation. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) already requires electronic health records to be stored online for a significant period of time. The passage of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010 will increase the number of patients in the healthcare system. Given that a single magnetic resonance image is 100 megabytes, one can begin to see how an increase in the access to healthcare in the U.S. will have a major impact on data storage and associated technologies.
Big data. The ways that big data — the popular term used to describe the exponential growth, availability, and use of information — can potentially be leveraged in a healthcare setting seem to be boundless. Big data can encompass everything from: collecting and analyzing real-time data to make clinical decisions; recording financial transactions; measuring customer satisfaction; tracking patients, supplies, and equipment; and monitoring the physical plant. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the big data business will grow to $34 billion this year in part because of increased use in the healthcare industry. The need to leverage this technology is clear even though there is still a lack of standardization and interoperability.
FACILITY IMPACT
Unfortunately, most hospital and health system data centers are located in the basement of a hospital wing with minimal expansion capability. Many are poorly located for servicing and are secured by nothing more than a swipe-card lock. The typical data center was designed for low-density storage of computer equipment. While newer high-density storage systems are available, they generate more heat thus requiring substantially more power for cooling — which could lead to reliability problems.
While healthcare organizations focus on selecting and implementing the information systems to enable future technologies, the capabilities of the hospital’s physical data center infrastructure to support the scale of these deployments are often overlooked. It is critical that a long-range master plan for the data center be developed in conjunction with the health system’s information technology strategic plan. After an evaluation of the current equipment and space, the future needs of the health system — in terms of servers, networking, and storage — can be projected. This will assure that issues involving future space, cooling load, and power requirements are identified as well as the level of reliability and redundancy. This will ultimately lead to an informed decision regarding when, where, and how to expand or replace an existing data center.
It should also be noted that for some healthcare systems, outsourcing one or more of its information technology functions may be the preferred solution given the need for data security and reliability, the competency and specialized skills of its staff, and available investment capital.
This article is an update of a previous post.