The Galway Clinic in West Ireland is implementing a data archiving and management solution from BridgeHead Software to create an electronic patient record.
The private 126-bed hospital plans to digitise five years’ worth of patient documents that it has accumulated since it first opened in 2004, using dedicated software from hospital information systems provider, Meditech.
It will then use BridgeHead’s BH FileStore software for archiving, long-term storage and retrieval of scanned patient documents.
The electronic data will then be placed in a BridgeHeads FileStore secure, fully indexed archive where clinicians will be able to locate specific archived information using content and metadata search facilities.
Richard Murdock, network administrator at The Galway Clinic, said: “Our data is growing exponentially as we strive to achieve a totally paperless environment.
“Now our data will grow even faster with our current plans to put in place a cost-effective, long-term data storage and access strategy and BH FileStores’s achieving will provide an essential role in this.”
As newer documents are digitised, they will be stored on the hospitals Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN).
Documents that are not frequently accessed by clinicians will be automatically identified and repositioned into a lower cost secondary storage within the archive.
Murdock added: “Our most expensive, high availability, primary storage assets will be reserved for current patient documents. To contain costs, older data will be moved and remain accessible on longer-term storage within BH FileStore.”
The software can hold multiple copies of an archive in multiple solutions, so data can be protected without having to perform frequent back-ups.
Charles Mallio, vice president of business development and corporate marketing at BridgeHead Software, said: “Our experience of working with hundreds of hospitals leads us to estimate that in many cases digitising relevant paper documents could generate as much as 60 gigabytes of data per bed per year.
“It’s no easy task keeping this amount of data stored, protected and accessible, and that’s where archiving systems such as BH FileStore can help.”
Links: BridgeHead