Electronic health records: Easing the burden in the data center
By TerryAnn Fitzgerald, HP Networking Group Industry Solutions Marketing Manager
InformationWeek recently published survey results from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) showing that 81% of U.S. hospitals and 41% of U.S. office-based physicians intend to register for federal incentive payments for adoption and meaningful use of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology.
While there is an urgent need for the deployment of EHRs, healthcare organizations need to be aware of the impact of the EHR at each point in the network. Nowhere will EHR have a greater impact than in the data center.
EHR: Fast, furious and widespread
Studying this, it becomes clear that you’ll need to accommodate this diversity via policy-based management, tight access controls, support for bigger bandwidth, and the ability to easily build out 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.
A purpose-built data center infrastructure
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 
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 consumption. So despite the fact that you’ll be bringing on a resource-intensive application, you’ll have minimal impact on overall data center resources.
You can learn more about HP networking healthcare and data center solutions.
In my next blog, I’ll discuss the impact of EHR on the campus LAN and how you can plan now to handle them with ease.
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