A UBM TECH EXECUTIVE BRIEF NOVEMBER 2012 Converged Medical Infrastructure and the Business Value for Healthcare Organizations Brought to you by
Converged Medical Infrastructure and the Business Value for Healthcare Organizations 2 As the use of electronic medical records (EMR) continues to grow, healthcare organizations must address the explosion of data and ensure that information is secure and that regulatory requirements for the protection and privacy of patient records are being met. At the same time, healthcare workers are becoming increasingly dependent on mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablet computers, and organizations are struggling to figure out how they can effectively manage these devices and the data they contain. In addition, healthcare organizations have a need for integration, efficiency, and reliability in their infrastructures, and they must have in place provisions for data protection and disaster recovery. One solution that can address these various challenges is Converged Medical Infrastructure (CMI), a core offering from HP and Intel. Along with innovative storage and service products, CMI can help healthcare institutions meet the demands of today s constantly changing technology scenarios. This white paper looks at some of the challenges facing the healthcare industry and how a converged infrastructure can provide tangible business value to healthcare organizations. An Industry in Flux Few industries are going through as much technological change as healthcare. While companies in other industries are also grappling with the rapid growth of information and moves toward big data, healthcare in particular is feeling the effects of the information explosion with the emergence of electronic records. The move to EMR is well underway, as federal and state governments as well as insurance companies and medical institutions promote the adoption of EMR because of the potential efficiencies of electronic storage and access. 1 Healthcare institutions are facing a number of challenges as they increasingly adopt EMR. There are the requirements of meaningful use (which defines the use of electronic records and related technology within an organization), as well as ensuring privacy and security of records. In addition, institutions must ensure greater portability and efficiency while at the same improving care coordination (the availability of records). And they need to do all this while continuing to provide high-quality healthcare and keep costs down. Longer term, healthcare providers need to be able to handle all kinds of records, including imaging, and increase the exchange of information between providers, partners, and patients. At the same time EMR is expanding, more healthcare organizations are launching big data and analytics initiatives. A report by McKinsey Global Institute, entitled Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, says big data will play a role in areas such as clinical operations, payment/pricing, research and development, new business models, and public health. The huge amounts of data being generated including electronic records can provide benefits such as offering more cost-effective ways to store information, delivering more accurate information, 1. HP white paper, How Technology Executives are Managing the Shift to BYOD, September 2012
3 and improving workflow. If healthcare providers store patient information electronically, doctors and nurses can complete patient charts more quickly, likely speeding up the process of scheduling and treating patients. In addition, having instant access to EMR allows healthcare professionals to chart patients during direct encounters rather than later on, thus improving the accuracy of patient records. But the growing use of EMR and the increased reliance on digital records in general also presents challenges for healthcare companies. They need to be able to manage increasingly large and complex data stores and ensure that the people in the organization who need access to information can get it when they need it. Perhaps the biggest issues with data management are security and regulatory compliance. Delivering effective information security is especially critical because of the sensitive nature of patient records. Providing access to EMR increases the risk that patient records such as personal health information (PHI) will fall into the wrong hands or jeopardize the privacy of patients. Regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) set rules for securing records, and organizations that fail to comply risk disciplinary action. Finally, healthcare providers, like organizations in other industries, are dealing with the rapid rise in the use of mobile devices. The bring-yourown-device (BYOD) trend is only accelerating the adoption of mobile devices in the workplace. Increased mobility is creating new challenges for healthcare IT. Doctors, nurses, technicians, and others in healthcare frequently need to access data and communicate with colleagues and patients from multiple locations, so they re relying more on smartphones and tablets. In many cases, these devices are supplied by the healthcare institutions. According to recent research by InformationWeek, in which 337 healthcare IT professionals were surveyed, two thirds of doctors are using ipads or other tablet computers for medical purposes in 2012, an increase of 45 percent compared with 2011. Nearly 70 percent say they re using smartphones for medical purposes in 2012, up from 61 percent the previous year. BYOD and mobility in general offer benefits such as easier access to clinical applications or data, the ability to view information such as patient test results and order medications remotely, and enhanced collaboration and communications among healthcare professionals. All of this can result in increased productivity for healthcare workers and better care for patients. As with the growing use of EMR, however, increased mobility is creating new challenges for healthcare IT. One of the greatest challenges is providing security for devices and the data stored on them. In addition, organizations need to carefully control who has access to the network from their devices and which applications and data they can access. The InformationWeek study indicated that securing mobile devices is one of the more significant security-related challenges healthcare organizations are facing today. The CMI Solution Healthcare organizations can deal with many of these issues by adopting the concept of CMI developed by HP. CMI provides an overall way for healthcare organizations to maximize how their computing infrastructure supports the business including the management of EMR in the most flexible, cost efficient manner, CMI is designed to deliver the data center of the future today while helping healthcare organizations overcome IT sprawl, using technologies that deliver new levels of simplicity, integration, and automation in managing patient information. The innovation comes from uniting servers, storage, networking, applications, power, and cooling on a single, efficient platform that can handle any workload at any time. The converged infrastructure supports medical imaging and EMR solutions based on a number of leading suppliers in the industry. CMI provides features that address many of the storage and infrastructure challenges organizations in the industry face today, and can demonstrate high-level performance metrics such as increased retrieval speed rates, reduced facilities costs, and improved scalability and agility. HP s CMI offers a unified platform of servers, storage, networking, software, imaging and printing, and IT services that can be deployed by service providers. CMI which includes HP products featuring an Intel Xeonbased architectural foundation that enables
4 energy-efficient performance, data protection and scalability can help healthcare organizations deploy an infrastructure that supports the explosive growth of data and the constant need for security and regulatory compliance. By procuring standards-based CMI components from a single source such as HP, healthcare companies can access a single support network and streamlined support processes, with components KishHealth System reduced management requirements for its storage system, eliminated system performance declines during backups, and added disaster recovery capabilities to help ensure system uptime. that are validated and tested together in a clinical environment. The HP platform enables organizations to increase productivity, improve service levels and quality, cut IT costs by automating all aspects of systems and applications management, and provide healthcare services to patients more quickly and more reliably than before. CMI from HP provides the foundation for unified data centers that are moving toward a converged server-storage platform. This, in turn, delivers a common foundation for more efficient processing of healthcare data workloads. As the volume of healthcare data continues to grow, and as organizations adopt greater mobility and even more stringent requirements for information security and compliance, the converged infrastructure will help create the environment healthcare organizations need. Moving to a Converged Environment Healthcare organizations that have partnered with HP to leverage the capabilities of a converged infrastructure are seeing benefits from the strategy. KishHealth System, a non-profit, community-owned health system in Dekalb, Ill., that consists of two hospitals and several specialty clinics and local doctors offices, improved the response time of its EMR system and provided scalability for its picture archiving and communication system (PACS) with HP Converged Storage. The company s goal was to upgrade its storage systems in order to provide the scalability and performance needed by its EMR and PACS systems. It wanted to provide the performance required for its EMR system in a MEDITECHcertified solution and increase the available storage for PACS images. KishHealth System had deployed MEDITECH EMR software to provide digital medical records for its 250 physicians and 1,300 employees. It is also using digital imaging for X-ray computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and other imaging applications. Images are stored within an Agfa PACS solution. When the storage system the organization was using for PACS neared capacity, it started examining its storage needs for the future. While the project began as a way to upgrade storage for PACS, it rapidly expanded as KishHealth discovered that having improved storage capabilities could also help enhance the performance of its EMR system. The company looked for a solution that would automate storage-tiering to help improve the response times of its MEDITECH-certified EMR solution. The existing storage system was divided into separate areas for different tiers of storage, which made it difficult to move data between tiers and required that all the storage for an application use the same storage tier. KishHealth deployed HP s MEDITECH-certified 3PAR T400 Storage system, adding the flexibility and scalability it needed. The company also implemented an HP StoreOnce D2D4324 Backup with HP Labs-developed deduplication. The HP StoreOnce system backs up and deduplicates MEDITECH data, before sending it to a secondary data center, where KishHealth also deployed an HP 3PAR F400. The healthcare organization had also been using HP LeftHand P4000 for its VMware View virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and is moving VMware View VDI to the 3PAR storage. This will improve the response times of desktops and reduce wait times for patients. With the new 3PAR storage, KishHealth System saw an immediate increase in performance. Other improvements include reduced management requirements for its storage system, the elimination of system performance declines during backups, and the addition of disaster recovery capabilities to help ensure system uptime. In addition, the company has reduced storage operations costs for PACS and EMR, and improved MEDITECH EMR response time by 60 percent, which leads to improved patient routing. KishHealth is using thin provisioning on the 3PAR system to create a centralized pool of available storage, rather than allocating storage to
specific applications. Thin provisioning has reduced allocated storage by 62 percent. For organizations such as KishHealth System, a converged infrastructure provides not only the solution to a number of challenges, but delivers real business value that results in a solid return on investment. The shift to EMR is inevitable, and it is dramatically changing the way healthcare organizations manage information and records, While EMR promises key benefits, it also presents challenges. The mandates of meaningful use and accountable care, and the need for stringent security and privacy, are forcing healthcare organizations to rethink IT. As they deal with the churn that continues to characterize their industry, a strategy centered on a converged infrastructure might prove to be just the right medicine. 5 ABOUT HP AND INTEL HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com. HP and Hewlett-Packard are registered trademarks of Hewlett-Packard Company. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom and blogs.intel.com. 2012 UBM LLC. All Rights Reserved.