PATIENT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT WITH GRID-BASED STORAGE

The rapid digital evolution in e-health requires efficiency in the IT space like never before. Costs are spiralling with the increasing need to manage vast amounts of patient information and there is growing recognition of the need to consolidate and unify data to enable costs and information to be shared. Furthermore, recent natural disasters and terrorist events have sharply brought into focus the need for disaster recovery and business continuity planning. 

For many, the solution is advanced grid-based storage technology. This architecture embodies major attributes common to a utility grid: it can adjust resources to meet fluctuating demand, supports many different types of devices, offers reliability and redundancy and provides both disaster recovery and business continuity. .

Sponsor of this feature, Kodak, is a leader in advanced grid-based storage technology with its Carestream VIParchive software platform. The articles below explain how this grid IT infrastructure delivers advanced IT processes to healthcare; show recent examples of how VIParchive is driving a number of unique solutions across Europe and the importance of disaster recovery planning to every organisation.

	Answering the needs of today’s healthcare environment with grid-based storage technology In an environment where data retrieval of five seconds is considered slow by clinical staff, healthcare IT managers are faced with the challenge of how to store information efficiently and cost effectively whilst meeting the required response times for accurate retrieval of patient data. Over 100 installed sites for Kodak Carestream VIP archive software Worldwide, Kodak is the market leader in grid-based computing for healthcare, managing over 3 Petabytes of data across Europe alone. Over 100 sites are installed worldwide including a number of agreements for European e-Health initiatives where Carestream VIParchive software is driving powerful regional solutions with unique benefits Plan for a disaster – your organisation may depend on it Victor L Wainwright, MS IT, CISSP, Solution Architect, HCIS Professional Services, Kodak’s Health Group Recent natural disasters and terrorist events have brought the need for disaster recovery and business continuity planning (DR/BCP) into the spotlight. This planning should be viewed as an integral part of every project across the enterprise. As an IT leader for a healthcare organisation, there are four aspects required for a successful outcome: accurate assessment of risk, maintaining the right perspective, taking appropriate action and making time for testing.