BridgeHead Wins Storage Management Contract With The London Clinic

BridgeHead Software has won a contract to provide data backup and protection solutions to support The London Clinic, the UK’s largest independently owned non-profit hospital,  transition to a new, interoperable IT infrastructure.

The London Clinic has invested in BridgeHead MediStore and BridgeHead Integrated Disaster Recovery (BridgeHead IDR) to support its existing investment in BridgeHead Integrated Serverless Backup (ISB).

BH MediStore provides a central archive that will free up storage resources and improve the availability of patient data, while BridgeHead ISB/IDR will shorten backup windows, minimise downtime risk and improve recovery times.

Mike Roberts, IT Director at The London Clinic said: "It is rare to find a supplier, particularly one you inherit rather than choose, who surprises you in terms of their integrity, honesty, ability to collaborate, ‘can do’ attitude and willingness to help. BridgeHead Software is such an organisation. And then there’s the technology. BridgeHead Software’s suite of products provides a comprehensive platform for clinical and administrative data and storage management. They already underpin our HIS in relation to backup and DR – but their offering is so much more. I look forward to continuing our partnership into the future."

The London Clinic plans to use BH MediStore to archive, then manage and protect, up to 15TB of scanned data from its earlier version of the MEDITECH healthcare information systems (HCIS). This historical data will be stored on more cost effective media than the expensive SAN device where it currently resides, hence freeing up resources for the hosting of current patient information and reducing the primary backup stream.

As data is written into the BH MediStore archive, it is indexed (both meta-data and full-text indexing), making it easier for The London Clinic to ensure clinical staff can search for and access patient records when and where they are needed. Files can also be de-duped and compressed, where possible, in accordance with hospital policies.

Furthermore, as the data is written into the archive, multiple copies of the data are automatically generated that can be geo-dispersed, thereby enhancing The London Clinic’s overall protection and further enabling its disaster recovery strategy.

Tony Tomkys, Director of Sales, EMEA, BridgeHead Software, said: "What The London Clinic is doing with data is what BridgeHead suggests all hospitals do: remove static data from the primary backup stream and put it into a safer, more cost-effective storage environment where it can be accessed by clinicians and hospital staff when and where needed – as well as secured in the event of a disaster or system outage. In this instance, BridgeHead plays its role by ensuring patient records across all systems – regardless of vendor – are quickly and easily accessible, and that point-in-time replicas of patient data are intelligently distributed, in line with hospital policies, to the appropriate secondary storage (e.g. tape, disk, Cloud, even VTL), as well as geo-dispersed for disaster recovery."

The second step for The London Clinic is to provide data protection for its new MEDITECH environment. Consequently, it has also invested in BridgeHead IDR to complement its existing BridgeHead ISB.

BridgeHead IDR is an integrated data protection and disaster recovery solution that can be used for MEDITECH HCIS across all of its certified SAN environments. An existing BridgeHead customer, The London Clinic has been using BridgeHead ISB, a tape-based backup and disaster recovery strategy, to protect data on its MEDITECH HCIS since 2009. By adopting BridgeHead IDR, The London Clinic will gain the benefits of SAN-based data replication and snapshotting. Furthermore, unlike generic backup, replication and mirroring tools, BridgeHead ISB/IDR ensures that the MEDITECH database is properly quiesced prior to the backup process. Because of this, only ISB/IDR-based backups and replicas can be relied on to be restored quickly and predictably – every time – without time-consuming database analysis or repair.

Using BridgeHead ISB/IDR, The London Clinic will be able to backup data every six hours rather than once a day. BridgeHead ISB/IDR will also enable The London Clinic to significantly reduce and fine-tune Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives – both of which are, as BridgeHead explains in a recent white paper Healthcare Disaster Recovery: Why Disaster Recovery is Different in Healthcare, crucial to the implementation of healthcare disaster recovery strategies.

In future, The London Clinic plans to continue enhancing data availability by bolstering the protection of all other data across the hospital, including medical images from PACS and other systems and administrative data, such as email, spreadsheets and word processing documents. The London Clinic will also look into ways to optimise the backup environment with archiving across the board, incorporating better interoperability along the way. BridgeHead Software will continue providing technological support and advice throughout this process.

Mike Roberts, IT Director at The London Clinic, delivered a presentation – Data Free At The Point Of Need – at the HC2011 Conference in the ICC in Birmingham on Thursday 7th April. This presentation explored the complexities of storing and managing different types of healthcare data across various IT systems, while also making that data available to clinicians at all times.