HEALTHCARE & IT

The landscape is changing rapidly in the healthcare industry as medical providers prepare for supporting the Health Reform Act, which introduced HIPAA. The enactment of the stimulus package, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which provides over $30 billion for health information technology and specifically Electronic Medical Records (EMR). These and other Regulatory requirements for privacy and security will require many changes in both operations and the technology to support compliance and the growing demand for data.
 
Data storage is a major component of a growing number of strict government regulations and ever-increasing internal service levels, including HIPAA compliant data storage. As a result, businesses are scrambling to find a records management solution that transforms the way they store, and retain data to meet these new regulatory requirements--especially given the hefty fines and legal penalties that can accompany non-compliance.
 
Please note that HIPAA regulations require a backup and recovery plan that includes a daily offsite backup of your EMR (Electronic Medical Records) data. This requires that at the very least, you should backup your database and files containing your patient records and store it offsite on a daily basis. In addition, it is usually a good idea to do monthly full backups of your server and store it at an offsite location in case of a disaster.
 
The typical IT infrastructure in most medical enterprises has been slow to adopt the core technologies to prepare for the explosive growth in data, with the increasing using of digitized imagery and the conversion to EMR.
 
TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
 
With the advent of more cost effective storage devices, greater bandwidth and the emergence of cloud computing, there are more solutions today, to not only comply with regulatory requirements, but ensure that your business can recover from a data loss as well as provide the peace of mind to recover from a disaster.