BridgeHead and Sun Aid Development of Electronic Health Records

HEAT (Healthcare Enterprise Archiving Technology) data management solutions from BridgeHead Software and Sun Microsystems, Inc. are set to be a key supporting technology for storing and managing healthcare data as institutions begin introducing Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, according to the vendors.

HEAT, an intelligent solution for cost-effective long-term retention of healthcare data, can help institutions manage the large volume of data that resides outside of Healthcare Information Systems (HIS), including paper documents and information contained in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), making this information available to EHR systems.

“There’s a wealth of data that sits outside of the traditional HIS that make up part of an Electronic Health Record,” explained Charles Mallio, Vice President of Business Development and Corporate Marketing at BridgeHead Software, a specialist in healthcare data management. “Paper documents such as living wills, consent forms and drivers’ licenses, as well as medical images can all become a useful part of the patient record if you’re trying to create a comprehensive EHR.”

HEAT is able to take scanned documents and data from systems such as PACS and email and encrypt it, compress it and place it within an in-built storage repository where it is cost effectively stored and protected. Data within the repository is indexed and searchable, opening the way to integration with EHR systems.

“By combining Sun’s innovative products, which are widely used in healthcare, with archiving software from BridgeHead, the HEAT solution helps healthcare institutions improve patient care through improved data management and integration," said Joe Hartley, Vice President of Global Government, Education and Healthcare for Sun Microsystems.

“We’ve come across a number of institutions who are going through the process of scanning and digitizing paper documents as part of building EHRs,” explained Mallio. “The incentives to promote the adoption of EHR technology within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’ will mean many more will start going through the same process. And our experience of working with several of them has enabled us to estimate that just scanning relevant paper documents could generate as much as 60 gigabytes of data per bed per year. “

“Even for a relatively small 100 bed hospital, that would mean an additional 6 TB of new data every year. It’s no easy task keeping this amount of data stored, protected and accessible, and that’s where HEAT can help,” added Mallio.

HEAT comes in three bundles which are available to suit the specific requirements of small, medium and large healthcare organizations. It consists of three tiers of storage, a Sun Fire X4240 server running Windows, a Sun Fire X4540 storage server and a Sun StorageTek L48 or L500 Tape Library integrated with and managed by BridgeHead’s Enterprise Data Archive (EDA) software. The solution is self protecting ‘out of the box’ as it automatically protects and backs up the archived data and metadata.

“Storage costs are reduced because expensive primary storage is reserved for the most current data which needs to be more readily available, while older data is retained in the bundled Storage Server and tape archive. Because it is a self protecting system it will slash an organizations’ backup infrastructure and management costs as they grapple with the challenge of introducing EHRs,” explained Mallio.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides $19.2B in funding to promote the expansion of Healthcare IT, in particular the adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology. The legislation provides incentives during FY11 thru FY15 for “meaningful users of certified EHR technology”. It also imposes reductions in Medicare reimbursements for hospitals who do not adopt EHR technology.