Developing an effective healthcare data management strategy

The huge explosion in healthcare data, driven by EMR and imaging technologies, is now driving need more than ever. You really need to have an effective data management strategy – whether you’re fine-tuning your existing processes or procedures, or rethinking the entire way you manage your infrastructure.

You need to take a fresh look. You need to think about the different ways that you manage your information, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various solutions that you might consider. But the reality is that this needs to start at a high level. You need to make strategic decisions about information governance and retention plans. And this all then filters down into policies, and procedures and technologies such as data tiering, archiving, and DR best practices.

You want to support these solutions with a hybrid mix of technologies – disk, tape or cloud – each needs to be deployed in a way that maximizes your capability, maximizes your investment, and maximizes your return so you can optimize how you meet your business requirements, and how you spend your money.

In healthcare, the problem can be even worse, because your long retention times forces you to consider very carefully what information you’re storing, what information you’re not, and how you’re storing it. And so as you make decisions about your IT environment, you need to be sure that you’re thinking about how you consider your needs, not just today, but keep in mind that your data’s growing – you need to be thinking about your needs well into the future as well.

It’s really dramatic growth that impacts how we think about everything we’re doing around storing, retaining and archiving information. So as you go through that process, you need to know that you’re not alone. There are partners out there who can really help you, who can help discuss different strategic options and approaches, deliver a comprehensive solution to meet your information management requirements, not just today, but well into the future as your environment grows and changes.