Patient Records Healthy for Storage

Driven by the need to store massive digital files and follow new compliance regulations for patient records, healthcare is becoming a booming market for networked storage.

SAN vendors EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) recently announced major contract wins, and smaller vendors with products that specialize in digital content see this vertical market as one similar to the movie industry.

"It's one of the fastest-growing segments of IT," says EMC's John Mello. "There are two major applications: PACS and electronic patient records." PACSs (picture archiving and communications systems) store cardiology and radiology tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results, and other large files.

Healthcare storage needs have also expanded due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal regulation that requires records to be kept longer. "They're taking all that off film and making it digital," Mello says. "Those pictures take up a lot of storage."

Still, Mello says healthcare is a late adopter of technology, claiming that only about 5 percent of healthcare firms have sophisticated electronic storage systems. He says that most large hospitals already have them, while smaller and midsized facilities plan to implement them soon.That's one of the ways the vertical mirrors the overall storage industry, which has saturation in the enterprise but is now going after small to midsize businesses (SMBs). The mirror effect is also evident in the tiered approach to storage taken by health facilities. EMC calls it Patient Information Lifecycle Management, while others consider it just another piece of the ILM process.

Georgia's Gwinnett Health System was the first customer HP named when it introduced its ILM strategy last September. "Healthcare facilities need a lot of storage for large radiologies or MRIs, and that data is mission-critical at first. But over time, you don't access them as frequently," says Kyle Fitze, HP's director of marketing for online storage. Later, those records get moved to cheaper storage and eventually can be moved off to tape.

Even if only 5 percent of healthcare organizations use networked storage, the industry is already paying off for storage companies. HP last week announced a $784 million, ten-year contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for engineering support services and maintenance of the VistA Health Information Systems (see HP Wins $784M VA Contract). Additionally, EMC this week announced that the CareGroup, a network of four Boston-area hospitals, has extended its EMC storage to manage 40 Tbytes of medical data.

EMC lists UCLA Medical Center, Princeton Medical Center, Cornell/Columbia Presbyterian Medical, and North Bronx Healthcare Network as customers. Mello says his healthcare customers typically use Symmetrix or Clariion SANs or EMC's Centera Compliance system.

In early March, Health First said it would implement IBM servers and storage to support its PACSs for three Florida hospitals. Boston Medical Center and St. Anthony's Medical Center are among IBM's healthcare customers. IBM has a solution tailored to medical archiving, consisting of its FastT midrange SANs, a server, Tivoli Storage Manager software, and a tape library.The healthcare market isn't just about SANs: Leuven University Hospital in Belgium and Bronson Healthcare in Michigan use a Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) NAS system for a PACS.

Other vendors are gearing up for a piece of the action: Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA), DataCore Software Corp., McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), and XIOtech Corp. have also announced healthcare customer wins this year. Others are chasing customers in the market. Startups 3PAR, BlueArc Corp., Isilon Systems, LeftHand Networks Inc., NeoScale Systems Inc., and Sepaton Inc. joined EMC, IBM, and HP as exhibitors at the Bio-IT and Health-IT Conference in Boston this week.

Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch