In the world of healthcare, the need for a real time, data-driven infrastructure is paramount. As hospitals adapt to a more patient-centric model of operations and care, they are required to link into new and expanding healthcare information technologies for quality measurements and improved care decisions.
The goal of this care model is to improve individual health outcomes, not just population health initiatives. With each patient having unique concerns and/or health conditions, providers and health systems are tasked with connecting to their patients via:
- Mobile devices
- Remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools
- Wearables for real-time health tracking and interventions
This type of individualized 24/7 care requires the use of cutting-edge technology but the real challenge is building an infrastructure that can keep them online 24 hours a day. These devices simply cannot go offline because patient’s lives depend on them.
Due to this demand, the shift to ‘always-on’ care is a must-do for every healthcare provider. Given that competition for patients is high within the healthcare market, providers are apt to implement care delivery structures, such as the patient-centric model, that prove most appealing to their patients.
Providers can virtually care for their patients and facilitate medical attention at the right time and place, identifying and considering Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), and the ability to securely leverage and access patient information from health tracking.
Hospital IT teams must also now store the increasing volume of new patient-centric data and ensure continuous and speedy access to the ‘always on’ infrastructure. This infrastructure must also support existing provider workflows and storage of patient data for medical imaging, scanned documents, EHRs, pharmacy data, clinical reports, etc.,
Maximizing the Availability, Performance and Efficiency of Storage Resources
Leading hospitals around the world are adopting a software-defined (SDS) storage approach to meet their ‘always-on’ infrastructure requirements and stay on top of such a competitive market. This foundational approach provides multiple benefits and can eliminate single points of failure and safeguard for continuous, reliable data access and is allowing hospitals to achieve high-data availability for operational and care consistency.
For the new healthcare data-driven infrastructure, hospitals such as Maimonides Medical Center have turned to a software-defined storage approach. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Maimonides to keep up with the growing demand for critical healthcare data to always be accessible, be stored compliantly and be immediately retrievable. In addition, the organization was challenged with having a number of disparate systems that were not working in conjunction with each other.
Ensuring business continuity through high data availability was a top priority for Maimonides. The medical center was also looking for a storage platform that was able to securely and seamlessly manage the hospital’s storage resource expansion. On the data management side, the organization required an ability to consolidate storage management for mission-critical patient records, while eliminating the labor-intensive need for system administrators to micromanage the capacity requirements of life-saving applications.
Maimonides Medical Center Achieves Rock-Solid Business Continuity with Software-Defined Storage
The ability to have rock-solid business continuity is the overriding benefit that Maimonides Medical Center derives from software-defined storage. DataCore software made it possible with a flexible approach that includes synchronous mirroring in a metro-cluster where data is copied in real-time between two different sites as if they were co-located.
With this approach, if for any reason one site happens to be offline (as a result of a planned or unplanned outage), the system’s auto fail-over and fail-back will allow organization’s IT systems will remain up and running – ensuring for reliable, continuous business operations at all times, with minimal intervention from the IT department.
Additionally, by centralizing the management of all storage resources as a scalable, fully redundant virtualized pool, the hospital ensures 24×7 access to critical information. As a result, Maimonides Medical Center has eliminated lapses in data availability from hardware failure and storage maintenance.
With data’s vital role in healthcare, availability and accessibility is integral to a hospital’s ability to deliver effective care.
Learn how Englewood Hospital and Medical Center delivers patient care seamlessly through software-defined storage, as featured in Toggle Magazine.
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