With IT data and services directly impacting patients' lives, healthcare data center operations truly are a matter of life and death.

Challenge
The U.S. healthcare industry is facing operational and regulatory challenges that will influence its future direction for years, perhaps decades, to come. With the federal government ready to play an increasingly active role in healthcare business models and delivery, providers and insurers are turning to their data centers to find new levels of efficiency and productivity. As hospitals and other healthcare facilities become increasingly dependent on technology-based business and point-of-care offerings, the IT infrastructure needed to support healthcare technologies is becoming almost as important as the care itself.

With IT data and services directly impacting patients' lives, healthcare data center operations truly are a matter of life and death. As technological processes, such as electronic medical records (EMR), digital imaging, and wireless communications, continue to streamline the healthcare industry and improve patient outcomes, the criticality of applications, the data network and support systems cannot be discounted.

Healthcare organizations are facing challenges that go far beyond the demands of delivering quality patient care. They must address and meet patient safety requirements, outperform competitors, guarantee patient satisfaction, meet compliance mandates and transform an explosion of data into usable information. Uptime and security are leading concerns. Outages lasting only a few minutes, for instance, can be devastating when a clinician requires immediate access to the electronic medical record (EMR) of a critically ill patient. Meanwhile, government mandates - such as those imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)- require healthcare organizations to fully protect patient information.

Facing increasing industry and government pressure, healthcare organizations are striving to maximize their current investments while clamping a lid on soaring energy and other infrastructure costs. To improve healthcare delivery and optimize their business processes, healthcare organizations need to ensure that their data center infrastructure is integrated, available, secure, and capable of supporting increasingly sophisticated applications. Emerging telemedicine technologies, such as virtual consultations, medical imaging transmissions, and even the prospect of remote surgery, are requiring healthcare organizations to continually revaluate their infrastructure needs - particularly in processing and networking.

Solution
Seeking to balance costs and needs, healthcare providers are turning to IO to establish a solid foundation that will fully support their goals of improved patient care through secure, reliable and cost-effective data center services such as virtual storage for EMR and always-on network services for digital image transmission.

Learn more on how IO can help.