News
Galway Clinic digitises and archives paper records in drive to
electronic healthcare record
30 September 2009
The Galway Clinic, a 126-bed hospital in the West of Ireland, is
implementing a data archiving and management solution from BridgeHead
Software to support its drive to create a completely electronic
healthcare record.
The state-of-the-art medical facility, which provides acute and
secondary care services, plans to use BridgeHead’s BH FileStore
archiving software for the long-term storage and retrieval of scanned
patient documents. The documents are being digitised using dedicated
software from healthcare information systems provider, MEDITECH.
“Our data is growing exponentially as we strive to achieve a totally
paperless environment,” said Richard Murdock, network administrator at
The Galway Clinic. “And now our data will grow even faster with our
current plans to digitise all paper documents relating to patients. So
it’s crucial to put in place a cost-effective, long-term data storage
and access strategy and BH FileStore’s archiving and retrieval
facilities will play an essential role in this.”
Initially, the Galway Clinic will be digitising the five years' worth
of patient documents that have been accumulated since it was first
opened. The resulting data will be placed in the secure, fully-indexed
BH FileStore archive from where clinicians and hospital administrators
will be able to locate specific archived information using content and
meta data search facilities.
As newer documents are digitised, they will initially be stored on
Galway Clinic’s Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN). Over time, BH
FileStore will automatically identify older documents that are not
frequently accessed and reposition them onto lower cost secondary
storage within the archive.
“Our most expensive, high availability, primary storage assets will
be reserved for current patient documents. To contain costs, older data
will be moved and remain accessible on longer-term storage within BH
FileStore,” explained Richard Murdock.
Because BH FileStore can simultaneously maintain multiple copies of
an archive in multiple locations, data can be protected without having
to devote time and resources to performing frequent backups.
According to Charles Mallio Vice President of Business Development
and Corporate Marketing at BridgeHead Software, his company is well
aware of the data storage and management challenges created when
hospitals resolve to digitise paper documents as part of an EHR
strategy.
He said, “Our experience of working with hundreds of hospitals leads
us to estimate that in many cases digitising relevant paper documents
could generate as much as 60 gigabytes of data per bed per year. Even
for a relatively small 100 bed hospital, that would mean an additional
6TB of new data every year. It’s no easy task keeping this amount of
data stored, protected and accessible, and that’s where archiving
systems such as BH FileStore can help.”
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