GridBank for Healthcare

Business Challenges

Business Challenges for Healthcare

Demand for High Availability Data Access

As the medical sector becomes ever more driven by technological advances, practitioners are increasingly reliant on timely, reliable access to critical patient information, whilst the volume, velocity and variety of data collected and stored continues to grow. Within this environment, ensuring that information is continuously available and can be rapidly located can make the critical difference between life and death. Additionally, innovation in delivery of healthcare services requires high performance high availability access to information. Unacceptable delays in accessing critical patient data can lead to a reduced chance of successful patient outcomes. Additionally, corrupted or lost files or images can lead to misdiagnoses, sometimes prescribing potentially harmful medications and raising risk of litigation.

Retention and Disposal Regulations

Different data types and sources across the clinical disciplines have vastly differing regulatory minimum retention periods, from 2 years to 30 years to 8 years after the death of the patient to permanent preservation. Data types are also subject to mandated disposal periods. Additionally, in the face of litigation proceedings, records otherwise scheduled for disposal can be subject to legal hold for the duration of the case. There is significant complexity and administrative overhead involved in ensuring that the relevant retention periods are applied to the appropriate records.

Data Security and Auditing Mandates

Furthermore, EHRs are subject to security, privacy, confidentiality and auditing regulations. Organizations require policies and systems for secure authentication, tamper-proof data retention and audited search and access. Without stringent policies and systems in place to protect data and information stores, there is a risk that data flagged for disposal will be retained or that confidential data flagged for preservation will be accessed or modified by unauthorized users. Healthcare providers risk significant charges for non-compliance with security and auditing mandates.

Together, these challenges lead to several core data management risks:

• Potential penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA, CFR, SOX, DPA, FoIA and Public Records regulations
• Inability to identify and discover relevant emails or files within e-Discovery timeframes
• Loss, tampering, unintended disposal or unauthorized access or modification of EHRs

Escalating Storage Costs

The healthcare environment is characterized by continual technological innovation driving improved treatments, enhanced patient outcomes and constantly growing volumes of medical images, whether radiology, MRI or ultrasound. This growth in data leads to considerable challenges in data storage and maintenance, within an era of reducing budgets and increasing demand for immediate information access. As data volumes grow, the cost of primary storage for EHRs and medical images becomes prohibitive.

Tarmin GridBank for Healthcare combines a high availability information storage platform with comprehensive compliance and e-Discovery tooling, alongside hardware agnostic object storage with Object Dedupe and compression to address the data management concerns of healthcare providers.

Tarmin Solutions

Tarmin Solutions for Healthcare

Comprehensive Data Management Solutions

The Tarmin GridBank platform was architected entirely on the latest in proven enterprise technologies specifically to meet the information management needs of organizations of the future. It delivers a broad range of organizational benefits including high availability data access, simplified regulatory compliance and reduced storage costs.

Instant Information Access

Practitioners are dependent on high availability access to patient medical records. Tarmin GridBank provides instant, on demand access to:

• Files and Objects
• Electronic Health Records
• Medical Images
• Emails and Other Digital Records

Through provision of an interconnected data grid of nodes combined into a single scalable global namespace and fully integrated transparent tools for federated unified cross-organizational search, GridBank ensures that the right information reaches the right people at the right time. This leads to quicker diagnoses, enhanced patient outcomes and greater quality of care.

Information Governance Toolkit

The regulatory and legal environment places significant demands on healthcare providers in the form of retention and disposal mandates, as well as data privacy, confidentiality, security and auditing expectations. Tarmin GridBank provides a comprehensive platform for information governance, implementing simplified compliance through policy based retention and disposal of records and files, data protection through role based security and extensive access auditing and legally defensible granular legal hold for e-Discovery requests. GridBank provides a platform to store, protect and control medical records.

Storage Optimization

As data volumes grow and storage costs escalate in a world of shrinking budgets, it is increasingly important to store data in a cost efficient way. Primary storage media is extremely costly, whilst significant proportions of data stored on primary disks are accessed only infrequently. Tarmin GridBank integrates data tiering and classification to offload rarely accessed data onto secondary and tertiary storage, without sacrificing performance on critical data. Furthermore, through Object Dedupe and compression primary storage footprint can be reduced by up to 80%, significantly reducing total cost of ownership.

Differentiators

Tarmin Differentiators for Healthcare

Next Generation Information Management Architecture

Tarmin GridBank is designed from the ground up on the latest in enterprise-ready technologies to meet the data management needs of healthcare providers today and in the future. Based on massively scalable cloud oriented, object storage architecture, GridBank provides a central consolidated platform for all information management challenges.

Tailored Healthcare Information Governance Solutions

Tarmin delivers specialized information governance tools for the healthcare sector, ensuring compliance with regulatory retention mandates and high levels of protection of data stores. Tarmin GridBank provides a comprehensive toolkit for managing data compliance requirements, allowing organizational IT providers to simply and efficiently create policy templates to meet the various retention requirements of different data sources.

Data Protection

The GridBank platform has data security, encryption and authentication built into its core. GridBank offers a comprehensive solution for protecting confidential information from unauthorized users, search and data access auditing, maintaining write-once read-many tamper-proof data integrity, and authentication tools fully integrated with Active Directory and LDAP stores.

Enhanced Patient Outcomes

Ultimately, Tarmin's data and information management solutions for healthcare are designed to ensure that the right critical patient data is readily available to the right practitioners at the right time. This allows practitioners to focus on what they do best, improving patient health. In this way, implementation of the GridBank platform leads to enhanced patient outcomes and improved quality of care.