Data Centers Play a Role in EHR

dgoerke@davegoerke.com

As the brain centers of hospitals and healthcare providing companies, data centers allow these organizations to conduct business around the clock.  Housed in unique physical environments, with the latest advancements in construction and computing technology, data centers centralize and process a company’s mission critical information and valuable corporate resources.

If your organization has plans to build a new data center or to upgrade an existing one, proper design and careful planning are crucial to ensure your system can support your network needs for today as well as the future.  Your plan also needs to be scalable and flexible to help you meet what will be an ever changing landscape of requirements and regulations on private information set forth in the HITECH ACT of 2009 and new HIPPA compliance.  With more than 3 trillion bits of data created every second, the business world’s need for more content and information keeps growing at an amazing pace.  With this comes the need for data centers to store and process this information efficiently and securely.   As this amount of data and information grows, organizations will be increasingly challenged with ensuring their corporate data centers can deliver the computing resources necessary to support their business applications and tasks without compromising resources such as: power, labor, security, and cost.

With the growth rate for data centers at roughly 50 percent a year, an increasing number of hospitals are demanding video, voice and data systems, and EMR/EHR to be managed over one converged network.  As the role of the data center becomes even more crucial, a data center should be designed as a secure, intelligent, flexible and scalable IT platform to enable communications, security and building systems to interoperate seamlessly. Some of the key areas to consider when designing your data center include:

• Physical Location
• Power Supply
• Infrastructure Components
• Management Ability
• Security

As with any mission critical decision, it is always recommended to consult a professional that has a proven track record of success and is on the cutting edge of today’s data center solutions.