DATA MANAGEMENT Floor Scholten – Freelance writer and translator
Coping with the data explosion
Having direct access to accurate information in the hospital environment is often a matter of life and death. Data should always be available, accessible and retrievable, on demand. This requires a solid IT infrastructure and proper data management. Data centres, servers and systems must meet strict requirements in order to ensure continuity and security, now and in the future.
IT facilities in care institutions and hospitals have become more extensive and complex. In Holland, this is partly due to the increase of scale that took place in Dutch healthcare – resulting in large organisations with multiple locations, thousands of employees and tens of thousands of patients. Further, most medical equipment used in
patient care and research is increasingly linked to the IT infrastructure and the application landscape. Healthcare is increasingly driven by data, making hospitals not just providers of care; they are gradually turning into IT companies as well.
Big data Today hospital data centres, as well as servers and data storage solutions, need to be able to cope with massive amounts of data. The digitisation of healthcare has taken a hefty
flight. Due to the introduction of Electronic Health Records and applications to manage these, as well as imaging systems such as picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), the amount of digital medical data grows exponentially and with it so does the need for data storage space. An average hospital today in the
Netherlands, for example, requires approximately 50 terabytes of storage space per year and that is only the beginning. Small scale accounting packages have been replaced by Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, new digital file types are getting larger and larger in size –high- resolution X-rays and scans, for example – treatment plans and medication records have entered the scene and ever more information is exchanged between the various parties within the health care chain.
Data centre facilities All the above changes and developments entail new requirements when it comes to data storage, server capacity, data archiving and back-ups. An important question is whether, in the future, health care institutions will be able to manage and control all this in-house. After all, owning and managing data centre facilities is a complex and costly exercise that comes with the additional demand of meeting several specific
rules and regulations, such as retention stipulations, the Dutch Data Protection Act (Wpb) and procedures and standards for information security as defined in ISO 27001. Practical matters, such as square footage, cooling mechanisms, (emergency) power and energy supplies also need to be considered. According to an internal research report
by M&I Partners, Dutch hospitals currently store and manage their data in-house. The majority of healthcare institutions have their own data storage solution, whereby the data is distributed over at least two data centres, mostly in-house. There are a few exceptions however. Some – but very few – hospitals make use of a second external data centre (back up storage), including server systems and storage systems. Co-location – the co-use of a location – offers the advantage of a very fast and redundant network and aims to guarantee 100% uptime for all existing servers.
Privacy and the cloud The cloud is not currently very popular in Dutch healthcare. To date, hospitals have not used anonymous cloud services for the storage of backup data and archiving. There are several reasons for this. The main reason is concern about privacy. Hospitals like to stay in control of their data and so choose not to outsource it. This is not surprising in
‘The cloud is not currently very popular in Dutch healthcare. To date, hospitals have not used anonymous cloud services for the storage of backup data and archiving.’
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