Health Information Exchange Featured Article

August 31, 2011

Storage and Infrastructure Vital for Healthcare Providers in New Digital Data Age



The exploding demand for digital data in the healthcare industry should be pushing medical providers to reassess their storage and IT infrastructures, according to a report by CoreLink at prnewswire.com.

“Strong healthcare information technology adoption rates are fueling the healthcare industry's growing reliance on third party data centers,” according to this newly released white paper by CoreLink, a Chicago data center and managed service provider, CoreLink Data Centers, LLC.

The report advises that, to be successful, healthcare organizations must step up their “security, infrastructure, compliance, and availability procedures” to make sure they can provide reliable access to critical electronic health information.

The report, “5 Critical Success Factors for Selecting a Healthcare Data Center,” by Nav Ranajee, CoreLink's director of healthcare, outlines out the key issues to think about when healthcare providers are selecting data centers, such as the new security requirements under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a health reform law set up to provide privacy standards “to protect patients' medical records and other health information provided to health plans, doctors, hospitals and other health care providers,” according to medicinenet.com, and part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA was established to encourage healthcare organizations to meet growing regulatory compliance, storage and network demands concerning the transformation of paper files to electronic health records (EHRs).

Also part of ARRA was the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which dispensed more than $19 billion to encourage healthcare providers to adopt health IT procedures and penalties if they didn’t, according to searchhealthit.techtarget.com. 

Additionally Protected Healthcare Information was developed as incentives for providers and hospitals to adopt EHR systems between 2011 and 2015, according to the CoreLink study.

All of these require fully functional data centers for storage and processing of digital data.

“A large part of EHR is the data from Picture Archiving and Communications Systems that include MRIs, CAT-scans and X-Rays which generate large image files requiring large amounts of data storage,” CoreLink’s Ranajee explained in the press release. “The sharing of these files among providers in disparate settings demands even greater storage and networking capacities that can strain existing IT infrastructure integrity and security. . . Scalability, security, bandwidth, uptime, and disaster recovery are the essential elements of a reliable data center. Nowhere are these qualities more important than when they're delivered on behalf of institutions entrusted with managing patients' health.”

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Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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