News
Hospitals ill-prepared for the data explosion
28 January 2010
Hospital datacentres may not be ready for the rapidly
increasing demand for storage that more patients, the move to digital
information are creating, according to an international survey of IT
executives at small and medium hospitals.
The survey was conducted in the US, UK, Canada, China, France and
Germany by the HIMSS Analytics and sponsored by Dell.
The HIMSS Analytics survey asked hospital IT executives to assess the
readiness of their hospital datacentres 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
datacentres to meet these demands and to supporting efficiently
technology at the point-of-care the prime strategic priority of
hospital senior IT executives in nearly every country.
The Healthcare Enterprise 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 datacentres by an average of 20 to 50% over the next two years.
While many small and medium hospitals anticipate they will spend more
on IT next year, they also describe datacentres challenges that Dell
believes will 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.
Lack of datacentres standards complicate the information sharing
within and between hospitals necessary for diagnosis, decision making
and coordination and management of patient care. With refresh cycles of
five years or more, small and medium hospitals rely on servers that are
less efficient and cost more to run and manage as they prepare for a
significant increase in data over the next two years.
Without aggressive adoption of virtualization, hospitals that simply
add servers and storage to their datacentres 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
datacentres 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.
In the UK specifically, the survey highlighted concerns as
follows:
- Financial considerations drive IT strategy.
UK hospital IT executives see financial considerations as the
business issue with the greatest impact on healthcare over the next
2 years.
- Declining budgets. 50 percent of UK IT
executives indicated that their IT budgets would decrease the
greatest among surveyed countries.
- Administrative efficiency as top priority.
Unlike executives in other countries who identified technology at
the point of care as their top IT priority, hospitals in the UK are
driven to realize administrative efficiency and savings as a top IT
priority.
- Storage as challenge and opportunity. By
a wide margin, IT executives in the UK report the scaling and
management of storage as their greatest IT scaling challenge and the
upgrading of storage as their best opportunity to improve
datacentres efficiency.
One of the encouraging factors for the outlook of small and medium
hospital datacentres around the world include the growth of IT budgets:
three-quarters of hospital IT executives indicated that their IT budgets
would likely increase next year; only 8% indicated that their budgets
would decrease.
An action plan
Based on these findings and its experience with large hospitals, Dell
recommends a pragmatic six-point action plan to help small and medium
hospitals improve the efficiency and scalability of their datacentres to
support healthcare reform and business priorities and make the most of
their current and future IT investments:
- Eliminate complexity. Adopt
standards-based technology and an open and flexible architecture
across the datacentres in order to automate routine management
tasks, simplify virtualization to achieve optimal server and storage
utilization and lay the foundation for interoperability and
information exchange within the hospital and across the healthcare
system. Standardization now will reduce maintenance costs, which
consume a significant portion of IT budgets, and simplify scaling in
the future.
- Invest, but Invest Wisely in more efficient and
scalable systems and management tools that reduce maintenance costs
and have scaling capacity. Modern servers have significantly greater
processing capacity than previous generations. They are
easier-to-manage, virtualization-ready and can provide a significant
increase in performance over previous generation servers allowing
hospitals to run more compute intensive databases and applications
more efficiently. Regular server refresh can save money by reducing
management overhead and reducing power consumption and cost.
- Virtualize now to prevent server and storage
proliferation. Accelerate server and storage virtualization
to scale efficiently, minimize maintenance costs and free up budget
and IT resources for strategic HIT priorities. Use system management
tools to simplify management of virtual environments.
- Consider alternative models. Look at SaaS
models for applications with likelihood for substantial growth or
with large bandwidth requirements-- such as electronic medical
records systems. Also consider hosted application and datacentres
usage models for additional capacity when and as hospitals need it.
- Automate routine management tasks to free up IT
resources for strategic priorities. For example, Dell
factory-installs server images to eliminate time-consuming manual
configuration and reduce deployment and IT staff time. Also use
servers with embedded management tools such as integrated
controllers that monitor and manage performance from a single
console.
- Tier data effectively to reduce hardware costs, secure
data and meet data availability requirements.
Small and medium hospitals are a sizeable component of the
healthcare delivery system in most countries, said Jamie Coffin, PhD,
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.
|