Data storage

The importance of storage management in patient care

The primary concern for any healthcare organisation is always the treatment of the patients under its care. A fast diagnosis, the correct method of treatment and the impeccable handling of patients by healthcare staff are probably the most important factors of a well-functioning healthcare system.

Unfortunately, these are also the areas where the British healthcare system comes most frequently under attack. And whereas the third area of patient care can only be improved by human hand, technology can aid in improving the first two factors.

What does digital data have to do with patient care?

As in any modern organisation, all information is going digital. The amount of data that was stored in a cabinet room the size of a football pitch 20 years ago can now be saved on a USB thumb drive the size of a cigarette lighter. This has a lot of advantages, not least the fact that less physical space is required; however, there are also downsides.

As storing data is made very easy with the advancement of computing and the Internet, vast amounts of unstructured data (text documents, xrays, PDFs, scans, mp3 files, and so on) are created today, which previously would have been discarded, or never been produced in the first place. It is so easy to press ‘save’.

However, the result of this is that a lot of duplicate information is stored on the storage system, as well as data that is of little importance to healthcare organisations (for example, employee holiday snaps or mp3 music files).

Setting aside the fact this flood of data means that data storage systems are bursting at the seams, it also swallows a large amount of money. And not only that, having all data stored on a single system means Mrs Smith’s ankle xrays can be somewhat hard to retrieve under certain circumstances, if they are sitting somewhere between We will rock you and Strawberry Fields.

Getting this growing mountain of data organised is important for the first two factors of successful patient care. Why? Because fast access to patient history and to other relevant medical information is important in order to obtain an accurate diagnosis and have the ability to administer the correct treatment.

What can be done?

First, the good data needs to be sorted from the bad — the critical from the less important information. This has to be done by establishing the value of the file, by analysing who the creator of the file is and what information the file contains.

Network file control software, as it is called, intelligently manages all information as it is created. Such software is readily available and will automatically classify a file on creation and, according to a policy set by the healthcare organisation, place it on the appropriate tier of storage with the suitable access rights and security policies.

For instance, confidential data is automatically stored on secure storage media, with access permitted only to those who need it. It is kept for the specified period of time after which it is automatically deleted or archived to an off-line media. With network file control the chance of data leakage is drastically reduced. What is more, because data has been classified and tagged, it becomes easier to find — a crucial factor in patient care (as previously discussed).

Such software also provides single-instancing. Single instancing recognises that a file has previously been saved and resolves all subsequent copies to a single instance. The effect for the users will be no different — the file still appears as if it is saved where they think they have saved it, but in reality the system is only storing a single, shared instance of the file. All this can happen retrospectively, so that existing duplications are removed, as well as any new files entered twice by human error.

Being able to make fast and precise diagnoses and treat patients with the best possible method depends on a complex net of factors. It is important to realise that problems in patient care cannot be solved by implementing a piece of new technology.

However, what network file control storage management software can do is make healthcare administration more efficient and accelerate the treatment process of patients by intelligently storing information. A considerable sum can also be saved by applying this kind of storage, which will leave a healthcare trust with more resources for improving other critical health services.

David Jones is CEO of data storage firm Njini.