Are you equipped to deliver the healthcare of the future? In our new blog series, we explore key areas of consideration to help you make the decisions that will improve the lives of patients and healthcare staff.
Patients expect more from their healthcare providers than ever before, from receiving first-class care and knowing their medical records are kept safe from cybercriminals, to accessing user-friendly appointment booking systems. As customer-focused, seamless experiences become the norm across industries – banking, automotive, online streaming services – healthcare should follow suit.
To deliver the experiences your customers demand, different information systems, devices, and applications must be able to connect in a coordinated manner. Achieving interoperability should therefore be a top priority for healthcare companies.
However, a study by Health Affairs* revealed that in 2017, just 30% of hospitals in the US were able to meet the four key metrics necessary for true interoperability: finding, sending, receiving and integrating electronic patient information.
So how do you achieve interoperability to meet patient expectations and ultimately safeguard your organization’s competitiveness?
Start by tackling the need for seamless data exchange. A vast amount of information should be able to move easily between your Electric Health Records (EHR) and practice management systems.
This means your first port of call should be identifying the status of your on-site data centers to determine if can they support seamless data exchange? If you discover that they can’t, you can take the CapEx heavy route of upgrading your onsite data centres, or the OpEx route of colo/hyperscale/cloud. Doing nothing is not an option.
There are many benefits of colocation. First, a colo agreement will cost less than a major CapEx project to upgrade your own data centers. A colo agreement will allow you to scale and free up budget to invest in other areas, all while maximizing security, performance and guaranteeing 100% uptime. For companies in the healthcare industry, colocation has proven to be a viable alternative to on-premise data centers. “They’re able to focus on improving the quality and lowering the cost of care, not owning and operating data centers” said Mitch Fonseca, VP Data Center Products, Cyxtera, a retail colocation provider with 60 data centers and thousands of customers globally. “Our healthcare customers need the security and control of dedicated infrastructure in colocation that multi-tenant public cloud environments can’t offer. Recent innovations such as on-demand colocation are helping healthcare companies provision connectivity and dedicate compute to operate their mission-critical systems quickly and more cost-effectively when and where they need it. In addition, our highly connected facilities enable them to easily access the marketplace of service providers across the healthcare supply chain.
Panduit offers a complete family of Converged Infrastructure Solutions for colocation and cloud hosting providers that include hardware, software, and services. Our pre-tested, validated solutions are purpose-built for interoperability, assuring equipment will function at peak performance to transform your data center into a strategic asset.
To discover more about how ‘Generation Data’ is shaping the future of healthcare IT, download our new eBook.
* https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0546
