By TerryAnn Fitzgerald
We began our multi-blog electronic health record (EHR) discussion by talking about the urgent need for global deployment. Now we’re going to begin to dig down into the impact of EHR at each point in the enterprise. Nowhere will EHR have a greater impact than in the data center.
To understand the heavy burden the data center will carry in EHR deployment, you have to think of the ecosystem of players that are involved in EHR. Hospitals, insurance companies, laboratories, physician offices, clinics and imaging centers are among the numerous entities that will be accessing your EHR system to add and retrieve data.
Studying this, it becomes clear that you’ll need to accommodate this diversity via policy-based management, tight access controls, support for robust bandwidth and the ability to easily expand your network.
EHR is going to happen fast and it’s going to be widespread. Therefore, you’ll need to be able to quickly scale your data center architecture. Physically-oriented legacy infrastructure is too restrictive, expensive to acquire and costly to maintain to make it a viable choice in the world of EHR.
The best way to handle the EHR revolution is to deploy purpose-built infrastructure that flattens out your architecture and can be easily extended, managed and secured. Included in this approach is a virtualized switching fabric that gives you the reliability and failover you’ll need with EHR. Think about how many patients, payers and healthcare workers will be dependent upon your data center infrastructure. Application downtime will be intolerable. Without access to a patient’s EHR records, a patient could be misdiagnosed, a duplicate test could be ordered or an insurance company could be billed incorrectly. All of these outcomes have dangerous and/or costly repercussions.
With a virtualized switching fabric in the data center, you’re able to weave together all your resources into a single, logical pool. If a failure should occur, redundant infrastructure components and network services can take over with no user impact. You can also easily add switches to the pool. That’s the kind of reliability and scalability that you’ll need as EHR takes hold around the world.
Another critical aspect of broadening your network is the ability to control device and user access based on policy. The only way to do this effectively is through centralized management tools. These tools allow you to set limitations on how and from where users can access information. You can also granularly manage system-to-system access. For instance, an insurance claim system would not be able to access physician notes and the physician offices would not be able to see hospital billing information. This type of built-in security will help users gain confidence in the EHR system and ensure compliance with U.S. and global privacy regulations.
There is no doubt that once EHR gets under way there will be an enormous amount of data, including large image files, passing through your data center. To avoid bottlenecks, you’ll need infrastructure that can support 10 Gigabit Ethernet and higher. 10 Gigabit Ethernet has the added benefit of enabling you to consolidate your switches and network interface cards, which can lead to a reduced data center footprint as well as lower power and cooling expenses. So despite the fact that you’ll be bringing on a resource-intensive application, you’ll have minimal impact on overall data center resources.
In the next blog, we’ll discuss the impact of EHR on the campus LAN and how you can plan now to handle it with ease.
Tags: 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Data Center, EHR, Electronic Health Record, Resiliency, Virtual Switching
