* Storage needs of hospital networks
All network managers make best efforts to ensure that their networks are as reliable and fast as possible. For most of you, this is driven by a need to keep companies competitive and make workers more productive. In some cases, this need is driven by a higher calling.
When hospitals were large, monolithic structures in urban settings, getting patient records appeared to be a relatively straightforward operation. You sent somebody running down to the records room, they looked for the right box of files, sometimes found it, and then they ran the records back up to the professionals who needed them. Sometimes this worked well, at other times less well.
Today, hospital and other healthcare networks must deliver high bandwidth access to storage because lives oftentimes depend on getting information rapidly and without interruption to where it is needed. Part of the challenge of this is that the demand on healthcare-related IT operations has grown enormously in recent years: as the quality and quantity of information has increased, bandwidth and reliability have been challenged to keep pace.
Part of this is caused by analog-to-digital data conversions – medical records and x-rays being scanned into computer databases to eliminate the inefficiencies of paper records and film-based images, for example, have stressed the networks. But the challenge goes beyond that: more granular CAT scans, magnetic resource imaging (MRI) and other healthcare technologies, for instance – each containing far more information than they did just a few years ago – have resulted in the frequent need to move very large files. Moving files in excess of 100M bytes is no longer an exception.
Campus-based facilities are also being supplemented with remote offices that may be scattered over a wide geographical area. As the more remote parts within distributed healthcare systems come online, they bring with them a need for persistent access to data from their system’s central data repositories (or from other sources) that may be long distances away. After all, providers moving services to more remote communities must try to do so without diminishing the quality of those services.
This is typical of the environment in which HMO’s, hospitals and other healthcare providers try to deliver state-of-the-art patient care. Medical IT plays an important part when it comes to enhancing patient safety and quality of care in support of delivering better services to their communities. How to do this while at the same time becoming more cost-effective? In many cases, they are forgoing reliance on older technologies and are deploying high-bandwidth, high-performance optical and storage networks.
The hoped-for benefits to healthcare sites would include improved access to digitized medical images and electronic records for doctors, significant network cost savings, a better ability to manage new high-bandwidth applications, and adding efficiency and streamlining to their business continuity and disaster recovery operations.
Next time, we will look at how one healthcare network did this, and how they benefited from the experience.
