Information growth and information management must remain balanced as greater and greater quantities of digital data are stored. Assigning a life cycle to information is critical in storage management to ensure that data reduction and data growth coincide in an automated fashion. Organizations often struggle with information life cycle policy creation, and therefore may not take the additional steps needed to improve the way in which data is stored.

Our HealthDynamix professionals can work with your organization to build a multi-tiered data storage strategy, help establish basic information policies, and recommend the management tools needed to take the first step toward complete life cycle management. An incremental approach allows organizations to work through and identify the DNA of their information and then evaluate legality or business need issues that may take longer to resolve.

“Information Discovery” audits highlight the quantity and type of information being retained, and how this information is being stored throughout various tiers. Additionally, duplicate data and uncompressed data are identified to provide indicators for footprint reduction. This basic information provides a blueprint for immediate tasks that can improve your organizations data management approach. This information also provides a foundation for building business-impact and ROI analysis for archiving, storage, ILM, de-duplication and backup initiatives, providing a clear picture for prioritization of funds and resources.

The Data Unknown

A question every organization should ask is, “do I know my data?” Unfortunately, data management is often an afterthought, due to increased demands placed on the IT organization and lack of bandwidth to address this issue. As a result, operations budgets increase yearly, placing further constraints on funds available for new initiatives. A lack of understanding about data type, data structure, and data location can cause an organization to apply retention policies equally across all information. This data is incorrectly housed on production platforms increasing the costs and impacting performance.

Many healthcare organizations are storing all medical data for the same time periods, even though medical record retention guidelines may not require such lengths (e.g., The American Health Information Management Association cites retention guidelines from 5 years to permanent retention, depending on the situation and type of record). Additionally, a large percentage of information is actually duplicate information that simply needs to be stored once. Likewise, many file types are partially compressed or uncompressed when saved. Many organizations realize the immediate benefits of data reduction by just analyzing these issues. Data intelligence improves enterprise architecture planning, improves cost control, and increases application performance by enabling an intelligent and dynamic data storage infrastructure.

Know Your Data to Manage Your Data

Our HealthDynamix team can help you to select and deploy data discovery tools that will allow you start “knowing your data.” Data discovery can be done quickly and unobtrusively, and then applied to various models. This discovery will help you better understand the complex issues and realize greater ROI, while improving your organization’s data management strategy.

ILM tools allow for automated and supervised management of information, from various hospital applications, based on basic or advanced business policies. Many details must be considered when selecting an ILM platform:

• Various file systems and modalities

• Legal compliance requirements

• System templates

• Search and index methodologies

• Artificial intelligence technologies

• The application(s) used to manage your critical data.

Hospitals must deal with information created in or coming from various sources:

• E-mail and instant messaging

• File systems and portals

• Various applications and modalities (such as PACS)

Management of Information for Risk Avoidance

A coordinated information management plan and tools are necessary to keep pace with the growing data footprint healthcare providers are facing. Increased data security and legal requirements also necessitate the need for technology that can analyze, prevent, or highlight liability issues. Information management tools help avoid legal events while increasing ease of compliance and discovery when/if these events occur.

Our HealthDynamix professionals work with your organization to analyze the tools available to start managing information throughout its lifecycle. We emphasize a phased-approach that allows you to immediately implement low-impact data management initiatives within your organization that are not organizationally disruptive or require complex legal analysis. With a basic foundation and set of management tools, your organization can begin a comprehensive data taxonomy structure and associated information life cycle policy. These can be applied gradually and deployed together with your established management framework. Together, we can take the first steps toward efficient information management.

Healthcare presents many long-term record retention issues since treatment information and cumulative data are required to provide proper care. Depending on the nature of the information, not all data requires the same retention periods. Nevertheless, many organizations are applying the same retention lengths, not knowing about the data and tools needed to automate the life cycle of their information. In many instances, up to 75% of healthcare organizational information is static (versus dynamic) – this information may no longer be accessed frequently. Commonly, data that meets this criteria is being stored on the primary tier of storage, impacting performance and causing budget expansion. Data may also be stored on tape making searching and retrieval difficult, presenting future obsolescence concerns, migration issues, and long-term retention problems. Our HealthDynamix team builds customized retention strategies that utilize the various storage tiers efficiently – providing cost-effective long-term, near line, retention and retrieval archives. Ensuring that this data is also encrypted, compressed, and survivable of systems failures is essential for records retention. Our specialists can provide the economics and benefits data associated with such a comprehensive archive solution.

Preparing Future-Proof Archives

Long-term digital data retention has presented many problems due to the rapid change in technologies and media used in the storage and retrieval of information. Planning for permanent and multi-year retention – as is prevalent in healthcare – is often complex and frustrating. How to preserve data, migrate information, and future-proof content is a question every health IT provider must address. Many organizations have terabytes (or more) of patient information stored on tapes in off-site facilities. Tapes will begin to deteriorate, current read technology will become obsolete, and proprietary wrappers may hinder future reads.

Our HealthDynamix professionals offer archiving solutions that enable organizations to establish a long-term digital archives. Data will not be altered while solutions will ensure portability for future technology migrations. We also address many of the issues that exist with current archives that make movement, searching, indexing, metadata customization, and management cumbersome. These problems often prevent archiving, which should be largest tier of storage in most organizations. Our HealthDynamix solutions also provide for data encryption, data shredding, versioning, immutability, and have the ability to support the full scale of hospital file types and modalities providing one unified archive management platform. Contact us today to begin discussing your future archiving strategy.