HP Discover3 ways to reduce medical image storage TCO
Keeping storage capacity ahead of demand is nirvana to healthcare IT managers, CIOs, and PACS administrators. With the average hospital running ~150 applications, generating between 60,000-500,000 new imaging studies per year, and requiring ~60 TB of storage, long-term costs for managing patient data are rising. Frost and Sullivan report that storage hardware is only 25 percent of the total cost of managing medical information. There are myriad factors involved that contribute to the bulk of storage TCO. A big factor increasing non-hardware costs is full time equivalent (FTE) resources spent managing manual processes, disparate data silos, and piecemeal storage solutions.
Here are three ways you can reduce storage TCO to improve care, compliance, and collaboration.
1) Consolidate. Reduce storage silos by consolidating data from multiple imaging applications (e.g., PACS) into a long-term archive. The archive must be integrated and not a piecemeal solution that you will have to build and individually manage. Meet SLAs to your doctors, as consolidation across single or multi-site organizations gives them faster access to patient data.
One step further: Ensure the archive communicates with applications via open standards and does not modify data formats in a proprietary way. This is key to ensure that future applications can be cost-efficiently integrated.
2) Tier cost-effectively. Ensure that multiple storage tiers can be integrated into the consolidated archive. Employ data discovery and classification techniques to understand the clinical value of the data to select the right tiers as data changes. If the tiers can be integrated by third party software but not managed by the archive, storage TCO will go up as FTEs mange the pieces.
One step further: Develop business policies that the archive can automatically mediate to move data between integrated storage tiers as value changes to your organization. This will enable FTE resources previously spent on data migration to be reallocated, reducing storage TCO.
3) Streamline IT: A centralized management console will streamline IT operations regardless of the archive configuration. The built-in console should give your IT staff a centralized view from anywhere on the network of storage utilization per imaging application, site, and integrated storage resource, and full insight into the hardware and software status of each archive component.
One step further: Integrate your long-term archive with image management software to neutralize disparate data formats. This will give your clinicians access to all imaging data across the enterprise, enabling them improve collaboration and patient care.
