Hospitals are seeking new ways to improve patient care, reduce readmissions, and improve or maintain a healthy bottom line. EHR systems, telemedicine, and cloud-based diagnostic applications provide clinicians access to information anywhere at any time. These technology capabilities let healthcare organizations optimize ways to monitor patients’ health status, especially when remote. They capture and analyze an increasing amount of data to make better patient care decisions. Additionally, these technologies improve collaboration among internal caregivers, pharmaceutical reps, and payers.
The benefits to implementing these technologies are well documented.1 For example:
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Facilities using healthcare IT systems can fully audit patient records in 1.4 hours as compared to 3.9 hours with paper auditing systems.
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Over 82% of healthcare professionals reported that electronic prescriptions save time and reduce efforts.
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Over 75% of laboratory clinicians said that using EHRs allowed them to receive lab results faster than with conventional methods.
In order to leverage the power of technology, healthcare providers need an IT environment with the flexibility to meet their patients’ needs and to facilitate communication, data collection, and analysis for faster and more accurate patient diagnosis. This means implementing a system that is agile, secure, meets compliance requirements, increases transparency, and improves overall quality of care while meeting cost goals.
Legacy IT environments are frequently unable to support the processing requirements of analytics or the network bandwidth required for cloud applications. These older systems hinder healthcare organizations’ ability to keep mission-critical applications available when downtime can be a matter of life or death. Different systems that can’t share data have a negative effect on quality of care. Older systems are also less likely to be robust enough to meet imaging/video requirements for patient diagnosis.
Modern, virtualized hybrid IT environments offer the agility, availability, and security necessary for healthcare providers who need to control and keep patient data confidential onsite, yet want to access cloud-based applications and critical information to make better diagnoses.
In a hybrid IT environment, organizations can leverage on-premises infrastructure and seamlessly connect to the cloud for workload optimization. Organizations can tailor their individual approach to IT, deciding which workloads should move to the cloud and which ones to keep on-premises.
Modern hybrid IT can improve the quality of patient care and control costs through:
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Visibility across healthcare sites
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Higher, more consistent availability
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Greater data security
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Faster data analysis
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Improved collaboration among doctors, patients, and staff
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The ability to provision compute needs and reduce downtime or latency
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Increased scalability
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Lower costs and a more predictable method of managing the budget by shifting capital expenditures to operational expenditures
To embark on the hybrid IT journey, healthcare organizations need to modernize and virtualize their on-premises legacy IT environment and supplement it with a simple set of comprehensive, yet easy-to-use management tools. Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers “out-of-the-box” hybrid IT solutions for healthcare that are tightly integrated servers, storage, and networking components in a simple-to-deploy virtualized appliance. Smaller organizations with smaller IT staffs can benefit from the HPE ProLiant Easy Connect EC200a Managed Hybrid Server that provides pre-configured cloud services, complete with automated backup and recovery. This solution requires no capital investment as it has a predictable monthly subscription fee.
For larger entities, hyper converged solutions, such as the HPE SimpliVity 380, offer a pathway to the cloud with more advanced IT capabilities. These all-in-one virtualized systems feature tightly integrated compute, software-defined storage, and software-defined intelligence to provide automation, intelligent analytics, and affordability with investment protection.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hybrid IT solutions enable healthcare facilities to create a single platform for onsite and campus environments, facilitating ease of management and secure predictable performance. Additionally, hybrid IT solutions enable healthcare organizations to determine where best to execute workloads to comply with data residency laws and HIPAA regulations. Improved access to data provides better control and improved quality of patient care.
To learn more about hybrid IT solutions for healthcare and if it’s right for you, contact American Digital today.
1 The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, “Benefits of Healthcare Information Technology,” Dec 20, 2015.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise specializations include Platinum: Converged Infrastructure, Networking, Storage; Gold: Cloud Builder.
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