Health Imaging & IT - April 2008 - (Page 33)

sponsored by an educational grant from EMC Corporation hungry technologies Exempla Healthcare, a three-hospital healthcare system headquartered in Denver, has 7,000 employees and more than 2,100 physicians. The organization replaced six storage devices from another vendor with three EMC CLARiiONs and four EMC Centera systems. Exempla had reached its storage capacity with the previous devices. “EMC helped us analyze our current storage consumption, growth, and growth needs,” says David Pecoraro, chief information officer. To upgrade the previous system to meet its needs would have cost Exempla 30 percent more than the EMC solution. That made “the sell” to administration pretty easy, says Pecoraro. “This [solution] has much more potential. It was a complete financial sell. It was a no-brainer.” Before the implementation of EMC Centera, Pook was considering requesting an additional SAN administrator. “EMC has much better storage management. I no longer feel the need for an additional FTE.” The existing SAN administrator leads a more comfortable life now, he adds. EMC Centera is much more integrated than the past system and the administrator has one graphical user interface (GUI) he uses to manage the entire EMC environment. “It’s much more user-friendly.” For its disaster recovery strategy, Exempla has three data centers—one at each hospital. Each hospital’s data are replicated at one of the other hospitals. “We’re comfortable with how we’ve set up that replication scheme,” says Pecoraro. A fourth EMC Centera replicates all three hospitals’ data. Exempla has plans in place to build a fourth data center this year. “We’re making good headway in healthcare with clinical information systems and the paradigm is shifting from paper and pencil to digital. As that occurs, the industry is going to have to address this issue of disaster recovery and redundancy and failsafe technology. I think we are making progress.” david Pecoraro, chief information officer, Exempla Healthcare, denver The organization currently is storing 135 TB and has a growth curve of about 20 TB a year. However, “we’re growing at a growing rate,” says Lots Pook, chief technical officer. A growth consumption rate calculated in February 2007 already is out of date, he says. The plans were intended to get Exempla through 2010, but storage capacity will have to increase before that time. “Medical technologies are pretty hungry for storage space,” says Pecoraro. New advances make storage capacity a moving target that forces changes in storage requirements. Plus, purchasing decisions are made that impact storage needs. For example, one Exempla hospital will be bringing on an additional MR machine this year. “In February, 2007, we had no idea they were going to do that,” says Pecoraro. Those ongoing changes make scalability pretty important, Pook says. “The ability to respond to the unexpected is key.” Like Fraser, EMC Centera’s self-healing capabilities have been helpful to Exempla, particularly to the patient financial team. Before EMC Centera, the group experienced outages that would increase accounts receivable times. Now, the organization’s controller has noticed that the patient financial information has been much more stable. “Reliability is valuable and important,” says Pecoraro. “These are mission-critical applications we’re putting on these SANs that need to be up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have got to use equipment that is highly reliable.” advice from the field Managing information infrastructure in the healthcare industry has long been a challenge. “Healthcare has never been funded for disaster recovery or business continuity,” says Pink. “We’re challenged with access to capital for medical technology which competes with the disaster recovery and redundancy that other industries have come to expect,” says Pecoraro. “We’re making good headway in healthcare with clinical information systems and the paradigm is shifting from paper and pencil to digital. As that occurs, the industry is going to have to address this issue of disaster recovery and redundancy and fail-safe technology. I think we are making progress.” Addressing issues such as these are the reasons so many healthcare organizations have chosen EMC Centera. These organizations leverage EMC Centera to ensure the authenticity of their medical information, provide immediate access to the information, and implement all the protection and replication safeguards necessary to meet their challenging needs. As the archiving storage platform for their information infrastructure, EMC Centera has demonstrated a proven track record helping healthcare organizations to cost effectively support care decisions, improve operational efficiencies, and pinpoint best practice care patterns that improve healthcare outcomes. Healthimaging.com april 2008 | Health Imaging & IT 33 http://Healthimaging.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Health Imaging & IT - April 2008

Health Imaging & IT - April 2008 Contents On the Web The Enterprise News Update Cracking Down: CT Radiation Dose 3D Rendering: Options Galore Thinking Thin-Client Modality Review Ergonomics & Design Special Section: Storage Strategies Imaging Tools Technology Outlook People & Technology Technology Review IT Trends Reader's Resource Stat Sheet

Health Imaging & IT - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.