As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, hospitals and health systems are working overtime to keep up with innovation and expand access to care. To scale services, diversify and fill gaps in care for growing patient populations, hospitals and health systems are increasingly choosing to consolidate.
The transformative trend of hospital mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is beneficial for healthcare organizations seeking to connect the care continuum. Merging or acquiring new care facilities helps health systems grow by diversifying medical services to bridge gaps in care and prevent patients from seeking specialty care elsewhere.
According to Kaufmann Hall, 30 hospital and health system partnership transactions were announced in the first quarter of 2018, up more than 11 percent from the first quarter of 2017.
With deal making on the rise, health systems are faced with the challenge of consolidating protected health information (PHI) — data that is growing exponentially, thanks to the vast amount of information generated from extensive medical imaging, scanned documents, EHRs, pharmacy data, clinical reports, patient correspondence and more.
Regulatory mandates such as HIPAA and HITECH are further compounding the volume of data, the requirements for storing and protecting that data and the urgency to streamline storage practices.
While mergers and acquisitions bring many financial and results-based benefits, they also generate operational IT challenges related to combining and managing data from the disparate legacy systems involved. Securely storing and maintaining high availability of valuable patient data are top priorities for healthcare IT teams.
Today, a growing number of leading healthcare institutions have implemented a modern data storage architecture based on a software-defined storage (SDS) platform, which helps healthcare IT deal with the challenges associated with M&A by:
- Enabling seamless, cost-effective on-demand scale-up of storage infrastructures to handle the growing volume of healthcare data
- Simplifying management of all storage resources in a separate software-intelligence plane, across all storage types, freeing IT to deliver valuable new services to address emerging healthcare trends more quickly and easily
- Lowering costs by virtualizing healthcare data storage resources, which removes the constraints of such elements as data locations, data types, applications, or hardware types, and combines flexibility and true vendor independence
- Ensuring continuous availability of data by enabling immediate, automated recovery of critical healthcare data, with no risk of downtime.
Over a thousand of these leading hospitals and hospital systems have chosen DataCore, the company who pioneered SDS software which arguably offers the most advanced and complete platform in the market.
Their SDS software enables hospitals and health systems to address the mission-critical healthcare IT challenges associated with M&A while maximizing the availability, performance, and utilization of IT resources – allowing them to enhance patient outcomes while keeping costs low.
Handling patient data brings great responsibility and stringent regulations. As hospitals continue to broaden their base of services and operations to strengthen the care enterprise, hardware-agnostic, software-based storage will become a vital asset for technical teams to be able to cost-effectively and properly store data.
Interested in learning more about how DataCore’s SDS is bringing patient PHI to provider’s fingertips with zero downtime?
Schedule a demo with one of our expert solution architects today!
