The Galway Clinic, a 126-bed hospital in Ireland, is implementing a data archiving and management solution to support its move toward an electronic health record.
The medical facility, which provides acute and secondary care services, plans to use BH FileStore, from Woburn, Mass. (USA)-based Bridgehead Software. The software will enable the long-term storage and retrieval of scanned patient documents.
The documents are being digitized using dedicated software from healthcare information systems provider, MEDITECH, another U.S.-based technology company.
"Our data is growing exponentially as we strive to achieve a totally paperless environment," said Richard Murdock, the clinic's network administrator. "And now our data will grow even faster with our current plans to digitize all paper documents relating to patients. So it's crucial to put in place a cost-effective, long-term data storage and access strategy."
The Galway Clinic will initially digitize five years' worth of patient documents that have accumulated since the clinic 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 information using content and meta data search facilities.
As newer documents are digitized, they will initially be stored on the clinic's fiber 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 in the archive.
"Our most expensive, high availability, primary storage assets will be reserved for current patient documents," Murdock said. "To contain costs, older data will be moved and remain accessible on longer term storage within BH FileStore."
Charles Mallio, BridgeHead's vice president of business development and corporate marketing, said his company is well aware of the data storage and management challenges created when hospitals resolve to digitize paper documents as part of an EHR strategy.
"Our experience of working with hundreds of hospitals leads us to estimate that in many cases digitizing relevant paper documents could generate as much as 60 gigabytes of data per bed per year," he said. "Even for a relatively small 100-bed hospital, that would mean an additional 6 TB 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."
