November 17, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
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.
November 15, 2010 David Raths
article
Instilling a culture of patient safety involves creating an open atmosphere for reporting and addressing safety risks and for anticipating and preventing errors, as well as redesigning patient care systems. At the recent World Healthcare Innovation & Technology Congress meeting in Washington, D.C., executives from Rhode Island hospital systems described how a new Web-based reporting system being rolled out in the Ocean State is central to creating the first statewide patient safety organization (PSO), a data repository with protected information allowing hospitals to aggregate, trend, and benchmark data.
October 27, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
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Earlier this month, the Traverse City, Mich.-based Ponemon Institute released the first of a two-part national report on data center downtime . In that report, the healthcare sector scored the highest frequency of data center downtime, with an average of three outages over the past two years, as opposed to the financial industry, which reported the lowest frequency of downtime, with 1.8 outages in the same time period. Larry Ponemon, Ph.D, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, in an e-mail interview, recently shared with HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo his views on how healthcare technology growth is outpacing what legacy hospital data centers can deliver.
October 20, 2010 David Raths
article
When you hear the terms “clinical data warehouse” and “predictive modeling,” you probably don’t immediately think of home healthcare agencies. But over the last 10 years, the nonprofit Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) has developed some fairly sophisticated ways of providing relevant and timely data to its clinicians.
October 1, 2010 John DeGaspari
article
A survey conducted by Composite Software, Inc., San Mateo, Calif., a supplier of data virtualization products, has found increasing interest in the use of data virtualization as part of enterprise-wide data integration strategies. Robert Eve, executive vice president, says the findings are pertinent for large enterprises, such as healthcare providers, which have various sources of data.
August 12, 2010 John DeGaspari
article
The results of a survey, released last month by Woburn, Mass.-based BridgeHead Software, Inc., revealed that, despite rapid growth in volumes of data, relatively few healthcare providers have a migration strategy to transfer older data that is rarely accessed from primary storage to less costly storage tiers.
July 20, 2010 Karen Sandrick
article
Faced with skyrocketing imaging data storage costs, CIOs at three healthcare facilities found alternatives that have enabled them to slash expenditures, monitor their storage requirements, and provide more cost-effective backup solutions.
May 24, 2010 Daphne Lawrence
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It shouldn't be surprising that the Westborough, Mass.-based eClinicalWorks (ECW) came in as one of the top three vendors of interest voted by HCI's readers. According to a February 2009 survey from the Orem, Utah-based KLAS, 24 percent of providers considered the privately held company when making an electronic medical record (EMR) purchase.
May 3, 2010
blog
So, here we are in 2010 (if you want to know where we've been since 1965, take a look at my last blog post). Between the Open Source Software (OSS) movement and The Cloud, businesses are increasingly asking why they should pay for restrictive software licenses and the dedicated hardware to run it on when there are technologies and business models which can meet 80% or more of their business’ needs for a fraction of the dollar cost and implementation/maintenance effort.
April 16, 2010
blog
For at least the last 25 years or so, certainly ever since researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy coined the term “business data warehouse”, various vendors and technologies have been carving up and attempting to lay exclusive claim to overlapping slices of the data warehouse ecosystem - the sum total of the tools and methods required to support a data warehouse from source systems to end-users. Y
February 17, 2010
blog
One of my recent engagements involves a site wrestling with storage capacity and end of life issues with a PACS. It seems today you need a crystal ball to forecast when to add additional storage capacity before the hardware becomes obsolete. The trick is to avoid purchasing too much excess capacity too soon, versus risking equipment obsolescence and an inability to acquire additional capacity without replacing the entire platform.
