While the healthcare industry may spend billions on IT initiatives annually, most hospital groups today are working with limited budgets. Instead, they need to prioritize their efforts to maximize business impact and ROI in both the short and long term. Whether you’re a small clinic or a large hospital group, it’s time to embrace the top IT trends of 2016 – convergence and rightsizing – to create the efficiencies, services and outcomes that will set you apart from the rest.
At a high level, data center convergence is the next step in server virtualization and consolidation – one that removes much of the complexities previously associated with building out datacenters or enterprise infrastructures. It replaces the traditional, highly siloed IT model with one in which compute, storage and networking resources are shared across multiple applications. However, it lets companies use modular, repeatable and scalable building blocks to quickly transform healthcare IT operations for future growth.
At the same time, rightsizing ensures that your converged infrastructure is perfectly balanced to handle current workloads – i.e. it is not over or under provisioned. When implemented, it creates a highly scalable, flexible “add-it-as-you-need- it” infrastructure model capable of supporting healthcare growth and agility in an extremely efficient way.
For healthcare companies, a rightsized, converged infrastructure can support the workloads, applications, devices and security protocols needed to enable key corporate initiatives:
Transform care delivery models and increase clinician productivity by giving them secure, mobile access to EMR, test results and other data on tablets and portable devices as they move from patient to patient
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Gain the flexibility and scalability needed to store an ever increasing amount of patient data, imaging files, test results, billing records, sensor data, communications and more – for both short and long term needs
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Become data driven – prevent bottlenecks in urgent care and emergency rooms by analyzing patient flows; improve health outcomes by using patient data and national databanks to determine the best course of action; enrich expansion and specialization planning with geographic and public health data; etc.
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Enact stronger security policies to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, protect confidential data and mitigate the risk of breach or ransoming attack
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Speed the deployment of innovative patient services to that will differentiate providers from their competitors
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Add capacity, cut costs and reduce datacenter footprints as you bring more departments onto a centralized IT infrastructure pre-tested and approved for healthcare workloads such as EMR and imaging system implementations
Transform to differentiate healthcare services
At American Digital, we’ve seen how convergence and rightsizing can help healthcare organizations of all types gain a clear competitive advantage by becoming more efficient, empowering clinicians and improving patient care in bold new ways. Infrastructure building blocks, such as those included in the HPE Converged Architecture, provide a quick and easy way to transform your IT environment, regardless of your budget limitations. Instead of maintaining a large number of disparate hardware and software elements, you can create a more transformative, adaptive infrastructure that facilitates future initiatives. Let the experts at American Digital show you how to get started. Call us today!