As Kindred Healthcare CIO Rick Chapman begins to discuss storage strategies, he asks a revealing rhetorical question.

"The question you should ask me is, Why would I be talking about this, as opposed to the VP of data center operations?" The simple answer, he explains, is that Kindred's infrastructure and storage costs sit high atop his agenda-and his executive committee's-right now. As wave after wave of new data flows in-electronic patient records, e-mails, insurance and billing files, and government-mandated documentation-Chapman feels the squeeze on the overall cost and performance of his IT operations, he says. (Compare Storage products)

Storage is suddenly in the C-suite spotlight.

"All of a sudden, what used to be a mundane technology component and what the executive committee or the board wouldn't have cared much about and would have trusted to me and my subordinates, now we have to be more transparent, and be able to defend the purchases and the cost structure of the infrastructure," Chapman says.

"That used to not be the case," he says. "But now I have to make sure we're as cost effective and still able to provide the business service reliability for the company."

Chapman is no small-time CIO, nor is he one of those CIOs more comfortable in the back room than in the boardroom. Kindred Healthcare is the largest for-profit long-term health-care provider in the United States with US$4 billion in revenues, 52,000 employees and 600 facilities in 39 states. Chapman is not only the CIO but the chief administration officer, and he sits on the executive committee. He has worked in top IT spots at health-care giants Columbia HCA and Humana in the past.

So Chapman knows the complexities of health care from both the business and IT sides, and what he sees on the IT side as of late leaves him in awe. "We're growing [data volumes] by 40 percent a year, and now we have over 400 terabytes-just unimaginable volumes of data from what we had just a few years ago," Chapman says. "We've seen exponential growth, and it keeps pressure on the storage platforms."

As a result, he's vowed to eliminate traditional tape backup systems entirely in the next few years.

The 'Save Everything' Mentality

Chapman and other CIOs in health care face a vicious cycle of mandatory document retention that feeds on itself. Government regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), force every organization and every person to save every electronic medical record and e-mail for longer and longer periods of time.

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