These pressures often fall on the shoulders of healthcare CIOs and storage managers. Faced with increasing challenges in data volumes, storage performance and regulatory compliance, they must find better ways to manage data for their healthcare organizations.

1. IBM Software Thought Leadership White Paper
Healthcare
Manage more data, meet healthcare
regulations and improve availability
Addressing today’s increasing storage demands in the healthcare industry
with smarter management strategies

2. 2 Manage more data, meet healthcare regulations and improve availability
Contents These pressures often fall on the shoulders of healthcare CIOs
and storage managers. Faced with increasing challenges in data
2 Introduction volumes, storage performance and regulatory compliance, they
must find better ways to manage data for their healthcare orga-
2 Evolving and expanding sources of medical data
nizations. These challenges demand a smarter approach to
3 Healthcare regulations and stressed storage storage management, including performing efficient backups
and restores, improving data availability and providing data
4 The challenges of backup and recovery
protection. However, diagnosing these needs is only part of the
5 Increased demands for high performance and prescription for storage health. A plan to simplify administration,
availability maximize resources and manage costs is also essential.
6 The IBM approach to storage management for
healthcare Evolving and expanding sources of
7 Ready to respond to tomorrow’s storage challenges medical data
The pressures of converting medical records from paper to
7 For more information
digital—pressures such as government regulations, economics,
and the need to streamline clinical, IT and business operations—
Introduction have forced hospitals and clinics to accommodate unprecedented
Today’s alarming rates of data growth are nothing new to health- amounts of data. For most hospitals and clinics, if an EHR
care organizations. For decades, the healthcare industry has been system has not already been put in place, there likely are plans
in the midst of a digital revolution that continues to evolve. And to implement one soon. Providing storage to support these
as more health records and patient data are made electronic, and systems and managing it effectively requires the ability to scale—
as healthcare providers expect data to be both more secure and often to huge data capacities and sophisticated management
more quickly available than ever before, storage resources can capabilities—which would enable the organization to accommo-
come under considerable strain. date increasing volumes of patient records and data. And as
regulations take effect and the average life-expectancy of patients
Government regulations are not only pressuring hospitals grows longer, organizations need to plan accordingly to manage
and clinics to convert traditional medical records systems to more data for a longer term.
electronic health records (EHR) systems, they are also requiring
that data be kept longer, be more secure and be more readily As medical technology has progressed, additional types of medi-
available. As more health information goes digital, the expecta- cal information have also become digitized. Sources including
tion that the data be immediately available to practitioners and X-rays, computed axial tomography (CAT) scans, sonograms,
patients is higher, even in the event of a power outage or disas- digital images and videos continue to increase in number and
ter. Ensuring availability through more effective backup and resolution, taking up more and more storage real estate each
recovery plans for stored data has become a necessity. Losing year. There is also a continued push toward digital pathology—
access to critical health information is not an option. the practice of viewing, analyzing and managing the information

3. IBM Software 3
in digital slides, which are created using virtual microscopy to Healthcare regulations and stressed
convert glass slides to digital slides. This can involve increasingly storage
larger and more complex data sets. Finding an approach to stor- Among the drivers increasing data storage in healthcare are
ing and managing medical data as the technologies that create it the requirements of government regulations. These regulations
continue to evolve—and finding ways to prevent unnecessary mandate that healthcare organizations store and protect data and
data storage sprawl—have become top priorities for many ensure that it is readily available on a daily basis—for potential
healthcare storage managers. compliance audits or litigation—to prevent severe penalties or
costs. Regulations such as the Health Information Technology
IT and business decision makers in healthcare need to consider (HITECH) Act, the Health Insurance Portability and
storage and storage-management requirements not only for Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Electronic Discovery
medical data, but for key business information as well. Supply (eDiscovery) place storage-specific pressures on today’s
chain, pharmaceutical, financial and business-performance data healthcare organizations. Meeting these regulations not only
must also be stored and effectively managed with appropriate requires larger storage capacities, it also demands better data
security policies and backup measures. To handle this diverse protection and increased availability.
mix of clinical and business data, organizations need to consider
storage management strategies that can facilitate seamless The HITECH Act is one of the main regulations pushing
scalability as they reduce data storage requirements with healthcare institutions to convert medical records to EHR sys-
technologies such as data compression and deduplication. tems. One of the stipulations of the act requires healthcare
With methods such as these, organizations can see considerable organizations to demonstrate “meaningful use” of EHR systems,
reductions in administration time and significant cost savings. or to use the systems in a meaningful manner to perform
Worldwide healthcare IT spending in storage hardware is important functions, such as handling electronic prescriptions,
expected to increase from 2010 to 2015 at a compound annual exchanging health information and measuring clinical quality.
growth rate of 7.60 percent.1 Hence, ensuring cost efficiency has This regulation places specific storage demands on
become a top priority for healthcare institutions looking to
continue supporting the growing sources of medical data.
Worldwide healthcare IT Storage Spending (in USD millions)*
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
3121.56 3458.79 3827.88 4082.31 4286.25 4501.91

4. 4 Manage more data, meet healthcare regulations and improve availability
organizations—such as requiring storage for prescription, drug
allergy and patient demographic information, and requiring the Use case: OhioHealth reduces storage capacity and
ability to produce electronic records of patients upon request. management
However, attaining compliance with this regulation and imple-
menting an EHR system can require a sizeable initial investment Working to meet the meaningful use standards requirements
and substantial ongoing operational costs, such as updating soft- of the HITECH Act, OhioHealth—a network of hospitals and
healthcare providers based in Columbus, Ohio—needed to
ware and training staff to run storage systems. These capacity,
implement a new electronic medical record system. With
availability and financial pressures require highly capable and
requirements to store medical data indefinitely and quickly
cost-effective storage management solutions.
recover it on demand, the organization needed a storage
management solution that could perform these functions
Additionally, HIPAA requires that all medical records be stored without a large initial investment or high operational costs.
for a specified time in a secure environment. Two of the main By implementing an IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager solution,
areas of focus of HIPAA are security and availability. As more OhioHealth was able to significantly reduce the amount
medical records become digitized, healthcare managers grow of time needed to manage its environment and perform
increasingly concerned with maintaining security and confidenti- backups. The organization went from running full backups
ality. But maintaining security in a complex, expanding storage every 24 hours to running incremental backups every day
infrastructure can become technically and financially challeng- and full backups every other week. This not only reduced
ing. HIPAA also mandates that organizations readily provide administration time, it also enabled OhioHealth to require
much less storage capacity—both key cost-saving measures
medical information when needed, even in the event of an
helping the organization quickly realize its return on
unplanned outage. This requires that organizations create a
investment.
disaster recovery plan that can restore access to data after an
emergency event. This puts tremendous demands on storage
management systems, and on administrators, to provide highly
reliable backup and restore functions for potentially massive
The challenges of backup and recovery
storage infrastructures.
Losing data not only puts healthcare professionals at risk of
failing to meet eDiscovery requests or compliance with
Another regulation that requires high availability for medical
regulations—with potential results of lawsuits, fines or loss
information is eDiscovery. As part of the US Federal Rules of
of licenses—it also puts the health and well-being of their
Civil Procedure, eDiscovery requires healthcare organizations to
patients at risk. This makes loss of data unacceptable.
be able to respond quickly to information requests related to liti-
gation. eDiscovery also requires organizations to have a disaster
As a result, providing a backup and recovery system has
recovery plan, ensuring that requested medical information can
become an increasingly high priority in the healthcare industry.
be readily available for legal purposes. Combined with the
However, overcoming the challenges of protecting burgeoning
requirements of the HITECH Act and HIPAA, this is yet
volumes of medical data can be difficult. Performing backup and
another regulation that is pressing organizations to increase
recovery can require significant administrative time and effort.
focus on storage management.

5. IBM Software 5
Also, as electronic medical data continues to grow in its various to a patient’s medical history with accompanying medical images
forms, healthcare organizations cannot continue simply to pur- and data is critical. Making sure that the supporting storage
chase additional storage for backup space as they may have done systems are capable of high performance becomes one of the
in the past. In the case of a merger or acquisition, supporting a top concerns for healthcare IT.
sudden increase in medical and business data and managing a
more heterogeneous storage environment can be overwhelming Ensuring that storage systems deliver the high performance
for storage administrators. expected in healthcare environments requires the right manage-
ment approach. The operation of the storage infrastructure
More efficient, cost-effective ways to back up and restore health- should have no discernible effect on the operation of the health-
care data are needed—methods that employ data-reduction care environment or the patient experience, and implementing a
strategies and simplify the administration effort through unified management solution that can help optimize both primary and
management. Eliminating duplicate or unneeded data can help backup storage systems can help ensure that storage can attain
keep storage growth under control and reduce expansion costs, the right level of performance.
and compressing data can also help alleviate capacity issues.
Another way to reduce storage expenses is to move older, less-
active data to a less-expensive storage hierarchy—a management
strategy that can help to maximize utilization and improve
performance.
For the backup and restore systems themselves, healthcare orga-
nizations need more efficient, cost-effective ways to regularly
perform backups without using excessive storage space or unnec-
essary management resources. Healthcare organizations need
solutions that can provide intuitive, automated functionality to
enable cost-effective management.
Increased demands for high performance
and availability
In addition to backup and restore, high data availability has also
come to be expected from a growing number of medical fields.
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery includes a number of
Practitioners and patients often expect medical records, images integrated storage management features that are useful for a wide variety of
and other data types to be available without delay. Especially in applications.
emergency-room environments, the need for immediate access

6. 6 Manage more data, meet healthcare regulations and improve availability
The IBM approach to storage ●● Tivoli Storage FlashCopy® Manager: Enables administra-
management for healthcare tors to perform and manage frequent, near-instant, nondisrup-
For healthcare organizations looking to support growing data, tive, application-aware backups and restores, leveraging
reduce risks, improve availability, ensure high performance and advanced FlashCopy snapshot technologies in IBM storage
reduce costs, IBM can help. With storage management solutions systems
from IBM Tivoli, organizations can facilitate an efficient,
●● Tivoli Storage Productivity Center: Combines the manage-
scalable and secure storage infrastructure that can help to meet ment of assets, capacity, performance and operations into a
regulatory requirements and handle growing volumes of medical single platform
data. With automated management capabilities, Tivoli storage
management solutions can help to greatly improve administra- Tivoli Storage Manager also includes enhanced security features
tion efficiency and cost effectiveness, while improving backup to help protect critical data and meet regulations such as HIPAA,
and restore capabilities, resource utilization and performance. with automated data security encryption, encryption key man-
The IBM family of Tivoli storage management products agement and data-shredding capabilities.
includes:
For backup and recovery, the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Suite
●● Tivoli Storage Manager: Supports hundreds of devices and for Unified Recovery provides a collection of 10 data protection
operating platforms with many application-specific connectors and recovery software products that deliver a simplified, cost-
and includes advanced data protection, unified recovery effective way to implement and manage data protection and
management and effective data reduction capabilities recovery solutions throughout the organization. This solution
●● Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack®: Helps to ensure enables healthcare organizations to:
continuous protection for patient records and medical data
and provides a near-instant recovery software solution for
●● Simplify administration with unified recovery management,
business-critical Microsoft Windows and Linux servers, combining multiple tools and solutions into a single user
remote locations and small to midsize offices interface
●● Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack for Workstations:
●● Reduce the data storage footprint using progressive incremen-
Includes automated, continuous protection for healthcare data tal backups and built-in data deduplication
and provides a recovery software solution for desktop and
●● Implement advanced backup and recovery features, such as
laptop computers, with centralized management for up to automated disaster recovery planning tools, nondisruptive
thousands of systems online image backup, and intelligent, high-speed data
protection features

7. IBM Software 7
●● Increase efficiency with a hierarchy of storage, placing effective storage now and be able to grow along with the organi-
less-active data in a hierarchy of lower-cost storage, which zation. IBM can help healthcare organizations build and operate
helps conserve resources as automated policies migrate data to a smarter storage infrastructure with IBM Tivoli storage man-
the appropriate media type based on data value, access and agement software. The comprehensive software portfolio from
retention requirements IBM provides robust functionality that can help to protect
●● Enhance data security with data compression, encryption and critical data, deliver high availability and performance, and
management of encryption keys for Tivoli Storage Manager provide cost-effective, seamless backup and restore capabilities.
clients As medical data sources continue to expand, IBM plans to
continue developing innovative solutions to help organizations
In addition to its Tivoli storage management software, address the latest storage challenges in the healthcare industry.
IBM also offers healthcare organizations a vast portfolio of
storage hardware products designed with scalability, data For more information
protection, high availability and performance in mind, such as To learn more about IBM Tivoli storage management solutions,
IBM System Storage® products—with built-in technologies contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or
such as IBM System Storage Easy Tier® technology—and visit: ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/storage-mgr/
IBM System Storage ProtecTIER® Deduplication solutions.
The highly capable combination of IBM Tivoli storage manage- Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire
ment software and IBM System Storage products can help to the software capabilities that your business needs in the most
address some of the toughest challenges for today’s largest, most cost-effective and strategic way possible. We’ll partner with
complex healthcare organizations. credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to
suit your business and development goals, enable effective cash
Ready to respond to tomorrow’s storage management, and improve your total cost of ownership. Fund
challenges your critical IT investment and propel your business forward
In order to respond to growing compliance demands and rapidly with IBM Global Financing. For more information, visit:
expanding data from an increasing number of data sources, ibm.com/financing
storage administrators need smarter solutions that can facilitate

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1 Sven Lohse, et al., “Worldwide Healthcare IT Spending Guide,
2010-2015, Version 2,” IDC Health Insights, May 2012.
http://www.idc-hi.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=HI234891
* Ibid.
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