As electronic medical records become the norm, healthcare is placing an increasing priority on the security of patient data and the speed of delivery of that data. Patient data is captured in many different arenas: doctor’s offices, walk-in clinics, pharmacies, physical therapy practices, hospitals, assisted living facilities and nursing homes. This data is transferred electronically among all these facilities. The goal is to make healthcare records more complete for each patient, which will in turn lead to better patient outcomes and lower costs. The challenge is to allow for the robust exchange of information while ensuring that data is secure, assuring patient privacy.
The sheer volume of data makes the storage and security of data a bit more difficult. State and federal laws govern how long patient records must be saved. As medical technology improves, and more and more detailed imaging is available, the amount of storage needed increases dramatically year-over-year. One estimate says that healthcare data storage requirements quadruple every two to three years. This begins to make individual data centers impractical. The cloud offers a viable solution for the anticipated and ongoing increase in storage needs for healthcare data.
If the cloud is where patient data is going to be stored, your overall strategy needs to support this goal. The cloud is an effective and efficient means of data storage, but it requires bandwidth to transfer data. Keeping data secure through encryption depends upon even more bandwidth. Encryption is a key to patient data security. Your infrastructure must be set up to provide the additional bandwidth you will need to support the transfer of encrypted private patient data to the cloud. It is crucial to build your network infrastructure so that it supports the speed of the data network.
KTS serves as a critical planning advocate for our healthcare clients, ensuring their communications backbone is strong and scales as new technologies are integrated into the network, as facilities are upgraded and as campuses are expanded. Our healthcare clients get us involved early in the planning and design process for any and all initiatives affecting the communications network to save time and money.
If the patient data you gather will be stored in the cloud make sure your network is up to the task, contact us. KTS would be happy to evaluate your data network and guide you to the best and most cost-effective options to meet your data network needs.
