Storage

Cloud computing is becoming a valuable tool for hospitals, and there are good reasons for that, as more organizations digitize their clinical systems. I recently had a conversation with Richard Temple, executive consultant at Beacon Partners, Inc., Weymouth, Mass. Typically, a lot of the computerization by hospitals has centered on financial systems, and hospitals typically wanted to keep that information close, housing it in their own data centers, he says. But things were more manageable, in terms of what needed to be available. After all, if a billing system went down at night, lives didn’t hang in the balance. But with the advent of the computerization of clinical systems, hospitals are faced with requirements of uptime and redundancy. “Hospitals aren’t necessarily geared up to support a computing infrastructure of that magnitude, so they look to the cloud,” Temple says.

As technology consumers, we have come to expect a high level of functionality on the computerized systems we have come to depend on for our everyday tasks such as banking, tracking of parcels, and airline ticketing. Unfortunately, that same functionality that is typified by those systems does not extend into healthcare, which is often hobbled by technical problems such as fragmented source databases.

How secure is cloud computing as far as protecting patient data? At a time when many health providers are considering the use of the cloud, it’s a question worth considering.

The five-hospital Saint Thomas Health Services, anchored by Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro, Tenn., several years ago became one of the very first multi-hospital systems in the U.S. to create a fully replicated set of data archives, rather than simply a mirrored configuration, to support the continuity of its PACS and other capabilities. That organization's leaders have derived great benefit from their innovation.

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) is a mammoth enterprise, with 11 acute care hospitals, four skilled nursing facilities, six large diagnostic and treatment centers and more than 80 community-based clinics. With this large health system comes a hefty amount of patient data flowing in and out of its electronic medical record and 300 other business and clinical IT applications used by 20,000 daily online users. Previously, HHC had its data centers dispersed among 11 hospitals throughout New York City five boroughs. Weighing the cost of refurbishing all the aging data centers against consolidation, the cost was deemed too exorbitant to maintain the disparate data systems. So last year HHC went about consolidating their 21,000-square-foot data footprint to a slim 8,600 square feet. HHC’s principal production data center of 6,600 square feet, which handles up to 210 network racks, is located at the Jacobi Medical Center campus in the Bronx, while the back-up 2,000 square foot data center is in New Jersey and houses 130 racks. HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo spoke with Bert Robles, HHC’s senior vice president of information technology and corporate chief information officer, about the data center transformation and the resulting cost savings.