IBM Software

Healthcare

Thought Leadership White Paper

Manage more data, meet healthcare regulations and improve availabilityAddressing today’s increasing storage demands in the healthcare industry with smarter management strategies

2 Manage more data, meet healthcare regulations and improve availability

Contents

2 Introduction

2 Evolving and expanding sources of medical data

3 Healthcare regulations and stressed storage

4 The challenges of backup and recovery

5 Increased demands for high performance and availability

6 The IBM approach to storage management for healthcare

7 Ready to respond to tomorrow’s storage challenges

7 For more information

IntroductionToday’s alarming rates of data growth are nothing new to health-care organizations. For decades, the healthcare industry has been in the midst of a digital revolution that continues to evolve. And as more health records and patient data are made electronic, and as healthcare providers expect data to be both more secure and more quickly available than ever before, storage resources can come under considerable strain.

Government regulations are not only pressuring hospitals and clinics to convert traditional medical records systems to electronic health records (EHR) systems, they are also requiring that data be kept longer, be more secure and be more readily available. As more health information goes digital, the expecta-tion that the data be immediately available to practitioners and patients is higher, even in the event of a power outage or disas-ter. Ensuring availability through more effective backup and recovery plans for stored data has become a necessity. Losing access to critical health information is not an option.

These pressures often fall on the shoulders of healthcare CIOs and storage managers. Faced with increasing challenges in data volumes, storage performance and regulatory compliance, they must find better ways to manage data for their healthcare orga-nizations. These challenges demand a smarter approach to storage management, including performing efficient backups and restores, improving data availability and providing data protection. However, diagnosing these needs is only part of the prescription for storage health. A plan to simplify administration, maximize resources and manage costs is also essential.

Evolving and expanding sources of medical dataThe pressures of converting medical records from paper to digital—pressures such as government regulations, economics, and the need to streamline clinical, IT and business operations—have forced hospitals and clinics to accommodate unprecedented amounts of data. For most hospitals and clinics, if an EHR system has not already been put in place, there likely are plans to implement one soon. Providing storage to support these systems and managing it effectively requires the ability to scale—often to huge data capacities and sophisticated management capabilities—which would enable the organization to accommo-date increasing volumes of patient records and data. And as regulations take effect and the average life-expectancy of patients grows longer, organizations need to plan accordingly to manage more data for a longer term.

As medical technology has progressed, additional types of medi-cal information have also become digitized. Sources including X-rays, computed axial tomography (CAT) scans, sonograms, digital images and videos continue to increase in number and resolution, taking up more and more storage real estate each year. There is also a continued push toward digital pathology—the practice of viewing, analyzing and managing the information

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in digital slides, which are created using virtual microscopy to convert glass slides to digital slides. This can involve increasingly larger and more complex data sets. Finding an approach to stor-ing and managing medical data as the technologies that create it continue to evolve—and finding ways to prevent unnecessary data storage sprawl—have become top priorities for many healthcare storage managers.

IT and business decision makers in healthcare need to consider storage and storage-management requirements not only for medical data, but for key business information as well. Supply chain, pharmaceutical, financial and business-performance data must also be stored and effectively managed with appropriate security policies and backup measures. To handle this diverse mix of clinical and business data, organizations need to consider storage management strategies that can facilitate seamless scalability as they reduce data storage requirements with technologies such as data compression and deduplication. With methods such as these, organizations can see considerable reductions in administration time and significant cost savings. Worldwide healthcare IT spending in storage hardware is expected to increase from 2010 to 2015 at a compound annual growth rate of 7.60 percent.1 Hence, ensuring cost efficiency has become a top priority for healthcare institutions looking to continue supporting the growing sources of medical data.

Healthcare regulations and stressed storageAmong the drivers increasing data storage in healthcare are the requirements of government regulations. These regulations mandate that healthcare organizations store and protect data and ensure that it is readily available on a daily basis—for potential compliance audits or litigation—to prevent severe penalties or costs. Regulations such as the Health Information Technology (HITECH) Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) place storage-specific pressures on today’s healthcare organizations. Meeting these regulations not only requires larger storage capacities, it also demands better data protection and increased availability.

The HITECH Act is one of the main regulations pushing healthcare institutions to convert medical records to EHR sys-tems. One of the stipulations of the act requires healthcare organizations to demonstrate “meaningful use” of EHR systems, or to use the systems in a meaningful manner to perform important functions, such as handling electronic prescriptions, exchanging health information and measuring clinical quality. This regulation places specific storage demands on

Worldwide healthcare IT Storage Spending (in USD millions)*

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

3121.56 3458.79 3827.88 4082.31 4286.25 4501.91

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organizations—such as requiring storage for prescription, drug allergy and patient demographic information, and requiring the ability to produce electronic records of patients upon request. However, attaining compliance with this regulation and imple-menting an EHR system can require a sizeable initial investment and substantial ongoing operational costs, such as updating soft-ware and training staff to run storage systems. These capacity, availability and financial pressures require highly capable and cost-effective storage management solutions.

Additionally, HIPAA requires that all medical records be stored for a specified time in a secure environment. Two of the main areas of focus of HIPAA are security and availability. As more medical records become digitized, healthcare managers grow increasingly concerned with maintaining security and confidenti-ality. But maintaining security in a complex, expanding storage infrastructure can become technically and financially challeng-ing. HIPAA also mandates that organizations readily provide medical information when needed, even in the event of an unplanned outage. This requires that organizations create a disaster recovery plan that can restore access to data after an emergency event. This puts tremendous demands on storage management systems, and on administrators, to provide highly reliable backup and restore functions for potentially massive storage infrastructures.

Another regulation that requires high availability for medical information is eDiscovery. As part of the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, eDiscovery requires healthcare organizations to be able to respond quickly to information requests related to liti-gation. eDiscovery also requires organizations to have a disaster recovery plan, ensuring that requested medical information can be readily available for legal purposes. Combined with the requirements of the HITECH Act and HIPAA, this is yet another regulation that is pressing organizations to increase focus on storage management.

Use case: OhioHealth reduces storage capacity and management

Working to meet the meaningful use standards requirements of the HITECH Act, OhioHealth—a network of hospitals and healthcare providers based in Columbus, Ohio—needed to implement a new electronic medical record system. With requirements to store medical data indefinitely and quickly recover it on demand, the organization needed a storage management solution that could perform these functions without a large initial investment or high operational costs. By implementing an IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager solution, OhioHealth was able to significantly reduce the amount of time needed to manage its environment and perform backups. The organization went from running full backups every 24 hours to running incremental backups every day and full backups every other week. This not only reduced administration time, it also enabled OhioHealth to require much less storage capacity—both key cost-saving measures helping the organization quickly realize its return on investment.

The challenges of backup and recoveryLosing data not only puts healthcare professionals at risk of failing to meet eDiscovery requests or compliance with regulations—with potential results of lawsuits, fines or loss of licenses—it also puts the health and well-being of their patients at risk. This makes loss of data unacceptable.

As a result, providing a backup and recovery system has become an increasingly high priority in the healthcare industry. However, overcoming the challenges of protecting burgeoning volumes of medical data can be difficult. Performing backup and recovery can require significant administrative time and effort.

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Also, as electronic medical data continues to grow in its various forms, healthcare organizations cannot continue simply to pur-chase additional storage for backup space as they may have done in the past. In the case of a merger or acquisition, supporting a sudden increase in medical and business data and managing a more heterogeneous storage environment can be overwhelming for storage administrators.

More efficient, cost-effective ways to back up and restore health-care data are needed—methods that employ data-reduction strategies and simplify the administration effort through unified management. Eliminating duplicate or unneeded data can help keep storage growth under control and reduce expansion costs, and compressing data can also help alleviate capacity issues. Another way to reduce storage expenses is to move older, less-active data to a less-expensive storage hierarchy—a management strategy that can help to maximize utilization and improve performance.

For the backup and restore systems themselves, healthcare orga-nizations need more efficient, cost-effective ways to regularly perform backups without using excessive storage space or unnec-essary management resources. Healthcare organizations need solutions that can provide intuitive, automated functionality to enable cost-effective management.

Increased demands for high performance and availabilityIn addition to backup and restore, high data availability has also come to be expected from a growing number of medical fields. Practitioners and patients often expect medical records, images and other data types to be available without delay. Especially in emergency-room environments, the need for immediate access

to a patient’s medical history with accompanying medical images and data is critical. Making sure that the supporting storage systems are capable of high performance becomes one of the top concerns for healthcare IT.

Ensuring that storage systems deliver the high performance expected in healthcare environments requires the right manage-ment approach. The operation of the storage infrastructure should have no discernible effect on the operation of the health-care environment or the patient experience, and implementing a management solution that can help optimize both primary and backup storage systems can help ensure that storage can attain the right level of performance.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery includes a number of integrated storage management features that are useful for a wide variety of applications.

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The IBM approach to storage management for healthcareFor healthcare organizations looking to support growing data, reduce risks, improve availability, ensure high performance and reduce costs, IBM can help. With storage management solutions from IBM Tivoli, organizations can facilitate an efficient, scalable and secure storage infrastructure that can help to meet regulatory requirements and handle growing volumes of medical data. With automated management capabilities, Tivoli storage management solutions can help to greatly improve administra-tion efficiency and cost effectiveness, while improving backup and restore capabilities, resource utilization and performance. The IBM family of Tivoli storage management products includes:

●● Tivoli Storage Manager: Supports hundreds of devices and operating platforms with many application-specific connectors and includes advanced data protection, unified recovery management and effective data reduction capabilities

●● Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack®: Helps to ensure continuous protection for patient records and medical data and provides a near-instant recovery software solution for business-critical Microsoft Windows and Linux servers, remote locations and small to midsize offices

●● Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Workstations: Includes automated, continuous protection for healthcare data and provides a recovery software solution for desktop and laptop computers, with centralized management for up to thousands of systems

●● Tivoli Storage FlashCopy® Manager: Enables administra-tors to perform and manage frequent, near-instant, nondisrup-tive, application-aware backups and restores, leveraging advanced FlashCopy snapshot technologies in IBM storage systems

●● Tivoli Storage Productivity Center: Combines the manage-ment of assets, capacity, performance and operations into a single platform

Tivoli Storage Manager also includes enhanced security features to help protect critical data and meet regulations such as HIPAA, with automated data security encryption, encryption key man-agement and data-shredding capabilities.

For backup and recovery, the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery provides a collection of 10 data protection and recovery software products that deliver a simplified, cost-effective way to implement and manage data protection and recovery solutions throughout the organization. This solution enables healthcare organizations to:

●● Simplify administration with unified recovery management, combining multiple tools and solutions into a single user interface

●● Reduce the data storage footprint using progressive incremen-tal backups and built-in data deduplication

●● Implement advanced backup and recovery features, such as automated disaster recovery planning tools, nondisruptive online image backup, and intelligent, high-speed data protection features

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●● Increase efficiency with a hierarchy of storage, placing less-active data in a hierarchy of lower-cost storage, which helps conserve resources as automated policies migrate data to the appropriate media type based on data value, access and retention requirements

●● Enhance data security with data compression, encryption and management of encryption keys for Tivoli Storage Manager clients

In addition to its Tivoli storage management software, IBM also offers healthcare organizations a vast portfolio of storage hardware products designed with scalability, data protection, high availability and performance in mind, such as IBM System Storage® products—with built-in technologies such as IBM System Storage Easy Tier® technology—and IBM System Storage ProtecTIER® Deduplication solutions. The highly capable combination of IBM Tivoli storage manage-ment software and IBM System Storage products can help to address some of the toughest challenges for today’s largest, most complex healthcare organizations.

Ready to respond to tomorrow’s storage challengesIn order to respond to growing compliance demands and rapidly expanding data from an increasing number of data sources, storage administrators need smarter solutions that can facilitate

effective storage now and be able to grow along with the organi-zation. IBM can help healthcare organizations build and operate a smarter storage infrastructure with IBM Tivoli storage man-agement software. The comprehensive software portfolio from IBM provides robust functionality that can help to protect critical data, deliver high availability and performance, and provide cost-effective, seamless backup and restore capabilities. As medical data sources continue to expand, IBM plans to continue developing innovative solutions to help organizations address the latest storage challenges in the healthcare industry.

For more informationTo learn more about IBM Tivoli storage management solutions, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr/

Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the software capabilities that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. We’ll partner with credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to suit your business and development goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. Fund your critical IT investment and propel your business forward with IBM Global Financing. For more information, visit: ibm.com/financing

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012

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Produced in the United States of America December 2012

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1 Sven Lohse, et al., “Worldwide Healthcare IT Spending Guide, 2010-2015, Version 2,” IDC Health Insights, May 2012. http://www.idc-hi.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=HI234891

* Ibid.

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