Disaster Recovery Tops Health IT Priorities in 2012

Following its 2010 survey results, BridgeHead Software Ltd.‘s second-annual healthcare data management survey found that DR is still the number one health IT investment priority, above other choices such as archiving, virtualization, cloud computing and digitizing paper records.
 
The survey asked healthcare IT professionals from all over the world about their ongoing strategies for managing their hospital’s IT systems. A majority of 55% of respondents listed DR among their top three IT investment priorities for the next year – an increase of 11 points compared to last year’s survey which saw 44% of healthcare IT professionals choose ‘backup/disaster recovery’ as one of their top three IT investment objectives.
 
Jim Beagle, CEO of BridgeHead Software, said: "These survey results confirm what we expected: disaster recovery is becoming more of a priority, not less. This is largely due to the fact that hospitals continue to generate massive amounts of different types of data via a variety of information systems – from PACS and RIS to accounting and administration. Amid this technological complexity and unstoppable data growth, the first step towards a robust DR strategy is not an easy one to define."
 
Beagle continued: "At BridgeHead, we believe the foundation for effective DR in hospitals is to understand data volumes as well as the type of data you are managing. If you don’t know these answers, it will be incredibly difficult – if not impossible – to implement an effective DR strategy that can reliably protect vital data in the case of a system outage, loss, corruption or disaster. I find it intriguing that over a third of our respondents, all of whom were health IT professionals, did not know or were uncertain how much data they were managing on primary storage facilities. Another third did not know whether their data volumes had increased or decreased in the last year."
 
He added: "For those hospitals that don’t have a full account of their data volumes, we recommend using an analytic tool such as our free FileScan utility, which profiles a hospital’s data and provides a detailed report to help them make informed business and IT decisions."
 
BridgeHead Software plans to release the full report on the findings in March.

In the meantime, below are some supporting statistics
from the Healthcare Data Management Survey 2011:

• 64% of respondents said their organizations had a disaster recovery strategy in place, but only 26% of those strategies were "robust, tried and tested";
• 68% of respondents said their data volumes had grown over the last year, 30% were unsure whether data volumes had changed and 2% said data volumes had decreased;
• 60% of respondents said they were managing more than 1TB of data on primary store, but 35% were unsure how much data they were managing on primary store;
• 45% of respondents said their organizations were planning a major storage upgrade (1TB or more) in the next year;
• 55% of respondents said some applications had archiving abilities, but only 16% said they had a full archiving policy that migrated data to the appropriate storage tiers.