The international healthcare sector is facing a challenging time. As populations age, the dependency on critical health services, and long-term care is placing greater stress on IT infrastructures. This situation is pained by a general lack of investment over the past ten years in IT infrastructure.
However, as the medical community moves increasing into the digital age, hospitals are becoming digital facilities with conversions to fully automated medical records, RFID/bar code scan drug delivery, computerized physician order entries, etc, healthcare delivery is becoming more and more dependent upon reliable and available datacenters.
Healthcare datacenters tend to be larger than those in the financial industry due in part to the number of people employed to manage health privacy regulations, such as HIPAA - the United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. HIPAA seeks to establish standardized mechanisms for electronic data interchange (EDI), security, and confidentiality of all healthcare-related data.
There is a current trend amongst healthcare providers to use virtualization to give care providers the mobility and reliability they need to access patient information at the point of care, and at the same time, enable datacenter staff to manage IT more efficiently with the strict security controls required by government regulations and patient privacy needs.
Through virtualization, healthcare providers can host traditional desktops as virtual machines running on centralized servers in a datacenter, making management easier for IT staff and controls on sensitive data stronger. Caregivers can access their virtual desktops remotely from any traditional PC, laptop, or thin client, giving them greater flexibility. IT administrators can authorize access only to applications and data necessary for each user, and data never resides on the physical device, preventing loss or theft of data. This level of control is especially important in light of HIPAA.
In the US in particular, where community healthcare is more common, virtualization is allowing local doctors to access centralized patient information whilst maintaining the security of that data.
Steve Foley, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH's) assistant vice president of technical services comments: Once you take away paper charts and all the records are electronic, people get very nervous about downtime.'
However, as Ron Bunnell Executive VP and CAO Banner Health says: Hospitals have to change or they won't survive. You can't provide a quality experience for patients and providers if you stay in the paper world. The more we as an industry can measure and report on what we're doing, the easier it will be to elevate healthcare to another level.