I was reading a Wall Street journal article about President-elect Obama’s “to-do list” for the five broad spending areas that his administration plans on pursuing. The fifth one caught my eye: Digitized Health Records.
A quote from the article:
“the country’s $2 trillion health care system is clogged with paper, folders and plenty of clipboards. Some 90% of U.S. doctors and at least two-thirds of hospitals still rely on paper patient records, and many of those who have gone digital can’t exchange the information with outside providers. The result is billions of dollars each year in administrative waste, duplicate tests and medical errors”
I’ll be interested in watching these U.S. government decisions roll out.
Will the US make the same decision that Finland did?
Finland’s population will soon be represented by objects stored on EMC Centera. I commented on the Finland/EMC press release here. Since the Finland announcement I’ve seen more and more articles and press releases describing different Centera deployments for records management and healthcare.
Records Management: Riverside California
The city of Riverside, California had a siloed, distributed, and inconsistent records management process until they implemented a centralized infrastructure using Centera. I read about their solution here.
One of the challenges nicely solved by Centera was that “every department had their own records program”. Centera has two features that play nicely here:
- Metadata tagging: as content is stored to the Centera it is also “tagged, dated, and marked”. This tagging process can involve specifying department-specific retention policies.
- Virtual Pools: Centera can be “logically partioned” on a per-department basement (the article does not state whether or not virtual pools are being used).
Health Systems: Daughters of Charity
I also read an EMC press release recently describing usage of Centera by the Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS), a regional system of six hospitals that span the California coast. The overall solutions at DCHS includes CLARiiON (w/MirrorView), VMWARE, EmailXtender, and Networker as well.
Diving into the article a little deeper uncovers some of the reasons Centera was chosen:
- large medical images are moved out of the primary store (CLARiiON) to drastically reduce backup/restore times.
- retrieving images from Centera results in a 60x speed up (versus tape).
- Centera replication is used for disaster recovery, resulting in uninterrupted access to critical medical images.
- the overall system growth in the last two years has gone from 45 to 150 TB, and one person still manages all of it (Centera’s “provision-free” capacity upgrade helps in this regard).
On top of it all, Centera is being used as a secondary tier for the medical department’s emails as well. EmailXtender is used to move older emails from CLARiiON to Centera This also shrinks backup windows and lessens the need to expand the CLARiiON primary store.
Quality and Scale
I’m convinced that two of the main reasons Centera is being deployed so often for medical imaging and electronic records retention is due to its current quality characteristics (5 9s availability) and ability to scale (25 million objects per disk).
Virtual pools, metadata annotation, and digital fingerprinting (ensuring authenticity) seal the deal.
The president-elects’ technology plan (Digitized Healthcare Records) will combine medical imaging and electronic records retention.
EMC Centera is well-positioned in this space.
Steve
