Heath-care vertical ill-prepared for data explosion

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS:  As government and healthcare leaders invest billions of dollars in healthcare information technologies (IT) to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare for their citizens, hospital datacenters may not be ready for the demand that more patients and digital information will create, according to a survey of hospital IT executives at small and medium hospitals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, China, France and Germany conducted by the HIMSS Analytics, sponsored by Dell.

The HIMSS Analytics survey asked hospital IT executives to assess the readiness of their hospital datacenters to support new information demands as reform initiatives such as electronic medical records (EMRs) and digital imaging become more pervasive.

Results suggest that there will be challenges associated with scaling small and medium hospital datacenters to meet these demands and to supporting efficiently technology at the point-of-care — the No. 1 strategic priority of hospital senior IT executives in nearly every country, said a press release.

The survey revealed that hospital IT executives at small and medium-sized hospitals believe that EMRs, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), capacity for storing digital images, needs of affiliated physicians and business intelligence will increase demand on their datacenters by an average of 20 to 50 per cent over the next two years.

Small and medium hospitals are a sizeable component of the healthcare delivery system in most countries,” said Jamie Coffin, Ph.D., vice president of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences.

“We must ensure that all hospitals—large and small, new and existing—are equipped with the right IT infrastructure to support information demands today and in the future. We cannot simply throw servers and storage at information demand or complexity will over-run IT budgets and leave little support for the strategic HIT priorities which support healthcare reform and business initiatives,” added Coffin

While many small and medium hospitals anticipate they will spend more on IT next year, they also describe datacenter challenges that would make it difficult for them to efficiently manage new information demands. These challenges include a lack of standards, security, extended server refresh cycles and complexity created by a large number of servers and vendors and limited use of virtualization.

Without aggressive adoption of virtualization, hospitals that simply add servers and storage to their datacenters to meet growing data demand will end up perpetuating the complexity that already consumes a majority of their IT resources, leaving less of their budgets for strategic priorities even as they invest more in IT.

Now is the time for small and medium hospitals to prepare their datacenters to handle strategic reform and healthcare priorities and for government leaders to consider the significant contribution these hospitals can make to an information infrastructure that streamlines administration, improves diagnosis and decision-making at the point of care and coordination and quality of patient care across the healthcare system, said the survey report.