Survey spotlights health needs

The survey, which was conducted by HIMSS Media and commissioned by CommVault, polled 416 healthcare professionals who work in healthcare systems, multi-hospital systems, stand-alone hospitals, outpatient and other related healthcare providers or organisations to determine the most significant drivers behind their investments in data management technology. According to those polled, regulatory compliance continues to be the most important driver in IT spending, followed by the need to improve operational efficiency and provide better support for new applications and systems across clinical, operational, virtual and increasingly mobile environments.

The HIMSS Media survey also asked participants to identify the applications and business needs driving the most growth in their organisations and to list their top infrastructure investments for this year. EMRs and Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) were cited as the biggest contributors to data growth. Additionally, top areas of infrastructure investment include:
· Electronic health records
· Healthcare data warehousing
· Health information exchanges
· Information governance
· Disaster recovery/continuity planning

Increased Demands to Protect, Manage & Access Critical Healthcare Information
The impact of healthcare reform has resulted in a rapid surge in data creation, which intensifies the need to properly secure, protect, index and retain all types of information and patient records to comply with regulatory requirements. U.S. medical imaging data, for example, is growing exponentially as advancements in PACS technology are leading to the production of more and larger image files.

Additionally, the widespread adoption of mobile devices by physicians and clinicians for use in patient care delivery creates new data management and security challenges. Nearly 61 percent of those surveyed cited a concern about managing, protecting and securing unstructured protected health information (PHI), such as emails, stored on laptops, tablets and smartphones within healthcare environments.

Survey respondents also were asked whether their organisations had implemented an eDiscovery or enterprise search solution to support regulatory compliance around HIPAA or Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. However, only 26 percent of those polled reported having a solution in place, which reveals a compliance risk exposure. Strategic data archives with enterprise-wide search can empower healthcare IT teams to ease the burden of data discovery and preservation, while reducing compliance risk and data storage costs.

CommVault’s new Simpana® 10 software provides healthcare organisations with an exponential leap forward in protection, access and analysis of vital patient data, business information and electronic medical records. With Simpana 10, CommVault continues to deliver the industry’s leading data protection with archive, reporting, eDiscovery and search capabilities within a unified platform. By delivering new automation, scale and self-service access, Simpana 10 is an essential component to modernise healthcare data management strategies as it helps healthcare organisations to improve operational efficiency, support new initiatives such as mobile clinical computing and information governance, plan for disaster recovery, and minimise storage costs – all within the context of ensuring regulatory compliance.

With Simpana 10 software, healthcare professionals can rapidly search and retrieve PACS images and electronic records housed in the ContentStore, even if the data originated from multiple PACS platforms. A centralised archive supports both Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and non-DICOM data, to improve efficiency and control data management costs for healthcare providers.