New Data Management Solution From BridgeHead

BridgeHead Software Ltd launches HealthStore for FlexPod.

A data management solution, HealthStore is designed to provide hospitals with a solution to manage all of the clinical and administrative data across the hospital enterprise – from critical applications such as Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems through to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). HealthStore enables organisations to store and protect their critical healthcare data – facilitating sharing with other applications, so that valuable information is available by those that need it, when they need it, thus ensuring better patient care and optimised hospital operations.

HealthStore integrates BridgeHead’s Healthcare Data Management (HDM) solution with FlexPodSelect – a validated and tested solution combining NetApp E-Series storage solution, Cisco Unified Computing System servers, and Cisco Nexus fabric switches into a single, flexible architecture. By adding BridgeHead’s software to the FlexPod Select stack, the solution becomes ‘healthcare enabled’, offering the management of all healthcare data across the entire hospital, including DICOM image files (e.g. from radiology PACS), studies from other clinical departments (such as ophthalmology and cardiology), as well as administrative data from the operational functions of the hospital (such as scanned documents, PDFs and even email). This solution will help organisations to eliminate data silos from disparate departments and streamline the IT management and support required to make the data available to clinical and administrative staff at the point of need.

HealthStore broadens the FlexPod Select solution to include a policy-based archive, designed for healthcare. This means that hospitals can extend their storage environments to benefit from a tiered architecture, taking advantage of alternative, e.g. more cost effective storage devices and media like dedicated or unified storage solutions, other disk types, or cloud storage, depending on customer requirements) – particularly for data that is older or unlikely to change. In doing so, healthcare organisations protect their investment in primary storage, ensuring it is dedicated to serving the applications that need it most and delay expensive storage refreshes.

The archive, provided by HDM solution, allows hospitals to place data into a central repository, which is indexed for easy search. The repository is governed by user-defined policies that help organisations adhere to their information risk and compliance obligations. It also allows multiple copies of data to be made as it is written – this ensures it is protected in the event of corruption, accidental deletion, system outage or disaster, and is available for recall from multiple locations, enabling adherence to SLAs (as the time taken to recover data is improved). In addition, other features include optional encryption and authentication for additional security. 

HealthStore can be purchased along with FlexPod as a new solution or can be extended from a customer’s existing FlexPod environment. It will be available through a small number of healthcare accredited, specialist FlexPod resellers.

Andrew Carr, director of alliances EMEA, BridgeHead, said: “At the heart of any healthcare IT purchasing decision is how it will positively impact patient care. There is nothing quite like HealthStore in the market. HealthStore lays the foundations for the effective management of all of a hospital’s data. The solution provides hospitals with a great opportunity to standardise on best-in-class technologies to create a robust, future-proof data management infrastructure that will deliver efficiencies, save cost and maximise ROI on their storage environments. And all of this while ensuring the availability of critical patient data to clinicians and other users where and when it’s needed.“

Thomas Ehrlich, VP partners and pathways EMEA, NetApp comments: “NetApp solutions are deployed at healthcare sites across EMEA. In this region, we are seeing a real move, by hospitals, towards a consolidated infrastructure approach. This is done primarily to drive down costs, increase efficiencies and ensure data is delivered at the point of care, when it’s needed. BridgeHead’s Healthcare Data Management (HDM) Solution is a natural fit to the FlexPod Select architecture due to its specificity for healthcare. This holistic solution from BridgeHead offers hospitals the ability to take a long-term, strategic approach to their data management. It makes sense for clinicians, it makes sense for IT and it makes sense for the hospital business.“