Social Insurance Institution of Finland Selected EMC
The system is estimated to reach 500PB in the next decade.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 18, 2008 at 3:41 pmEMC Corporation announced that
the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) has selected an EMC
information infrastructure solution to build one of the world’s first
centralized national patient record archives to keep the most essential
digital information protected, secure and continuously available. With 300,000
user licenses, the end-to-end architecture consisting of EMC Documentum,
EMC Symmetrix and EMC Centera provides all critical information
management solutions, including content management, storage and archiving, in
an architecture designed to support extremely large data volumes.
The EMC Documentum platform will manage all content on the vast eHealth
system. Patient and prescription data will be stored on several high-end
Symmetrix storage systems and archived on Centera content addressed storage
systems. The end-to-end combination of platform, software and services is
designed to ensure significant system scalability needed for optimum patient
care delivery — the system is estimated to reach 500 petabytes in the next
decade.
The new "KanTa" archiving system, valued at approximately 20 million
euros, will serve as many as 300,000 professionals within the Finnish public
healthcare and pharmacies, as well as private medical clinics. Throughout
2008, the system will provide an electronic prescription service, followed by
the completion of a comprehensive patient record and image archive in 2009. By
streamlining the information management processes of the entire healthcare
sector, the system is predicted to improve clinical productivity while
generating major financial savings.
"The new unified national patient record archive, based on EMC technology,
will provide the entire healthcare sector with radically more efficient
operational models. As physicians are able to have access to all patient
information regardless of where previous treatment has taken place — based on
an agreement with the patient — the entire national healthcare system should
benefit from this streamlined process. The Finnish citizens will benefit from
a single online information source, which will provide them with an unforeseen
opportunity to participate and influence their personal medical care," said
Markku Suominen, Chief Information Officer at KELA.
In addition to professional healthcare users, KanTa will provide all the
5.3 million Finnish citizens with access to information concerning their
personal medical information. Citizens will be able to ensure the protection
of their personal data by limiting the type of data displayed on their medical
profiles. The centralized KanTa record archive, complete with the "citizen
view" option, is first of its kind in the world. Together with the electronic
prescription service, the feature will provide a new level of patient security
further enabling patient information confidentiality. Coupled with the sheer
data volume the system stores and operates, it will quickly become the largest
database in Finland.
The Social Insurance Institution of Finland will have separate
environments for production, test and development, which makes the system
extremely reliable and robust while providing more efficient communications
and streamlined operational practices for the entire healthcare sector in
Finland. In addition, the scalable and secure storage and archiving technology
provided by Symmetrix and Centera systems eliminate the need to perform
backups of the KanTa system on tape. All data will be stored and archived on
disk to further improve healthcare information high availability.
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