Regulatory Compliance Number One Driver in Health IT Spending

CommVault  Systems Inc. announced at HIMSS 13 the results of its 2013
Health IT Survey, which reveals the measures organizations are taking to
improve the management and protection of all forms of electronic medical
records and address HITECH, meaningful use and HIPAA compliance requirements.

According to a release, the survey, which
was conducted by HIMSS Media and commissioned by CommVault, polled 416
healthcare professionals who work in healthcare systems, multi-hospital
systems, stand-alone hospitals, outpatient and other related healthcare
providers or organizations to determine the most significant drivers behind
their investments in data management technology.

According to those polled,
regulatory compliance continues to be the most important driver in IT spending,
followed by the need to improve operational efficiency and provide better
support for new applications and systems across clinical, operational, virtual
and mobile environments.

The survey also asked participants to
identify the applications and business needs driving the growth in their
organizations and to list their top infrastructure investments for this year.
EMRs and picture archiving and communications systems were cited as the biggest
contributors to data growth.

Top
areas of infrastructure investment include:

• Electronic health records

• Healthcare data warehousing

• Health information exchanges

• Information governance

• DR/continuity planning increased demands to
  protect, manage and access healthcare information

The impact of healthcare reform has
resulted in a surge in data creation, which intensifies the need to secure,
protect, index and retain all types of information and patient records to
comply with regulatory requirements. U.S. medical imaging data, for
example, is growing as advancements in PACS technology are leading to the
production of more and larger image files.

The adoption of mobile devices by
physicians and clinicians for use in patient care delivery creates data
management and security challenges. Nearly 61% of those surveyed cited a
concern about managing, protecting and securing unstructured protected health
information, such as emails, stored on laptops, tablets and smartphones within
healthcare environments.

Survey respondents also were asked whether
their organizations had implemented an eDiscovery or enterprise search solution
to support regulatory compliance around HIPAA or payment card industry standards.
Only 26% of those polled reported having a solution in place, which reveals a
compliance risk exposure. Strategic data archives with enterprise-wide search
can empower healthcare IT teams to ease the burden of data discovery and
preservation, while reducing compliance risk and storage costs.

CommVault’s Simpana
10 software provides healthcare organizations with a leap forward in
protection, access and analysis of vital patient data, business information and
electronic medical records. CommVault continues to deliver data protection with
archive, reporting, eDiscovery and search capabilities within a unified
platform. By delivering automation, scale and self-service access, it is a component to modernize healthcare data
management strategies as it helps healthcare organizations to improve efficiency,
support initiatives such as mobile clinical computing and information
governance, plan for DR, and minimize storage costs all within the context of
ensuring regulatory compliance.

With Simpana 10, healthcare
professionals can search and retrieve PACS images and electronic records housed
in the ContentStore, even if the data originated from multiple PACS platforms.
A centralized archive supports both digital imaging and communications in medicine and non-DICOM data, to improve efficiency and control data management
costs for healthcare providers.

CommVault highlighted its
healthcare innovations at HIMSS13 and demonstrated how the software
alleviates the obstacles in addressing and managing the current explosion in
clinical and operational data growth.

Jay Savaiano, director of business
development, healthcare, CommVault, said: "The HIMSS Media survey reinforces an underlying
theme – healthcare organizations want to simplify their IT systems and
environments to meet compliance demands and ensure the highest levels of
patient care delivery. With CommVault Simpana 10 software, healthcare IT teams
can not only protect and manage EMR, PACS and other healthcare information more
efficiently and securely at scale, but also support clinical and nonclinical
applications in one common, modern architecture to reduce administrative and
operational costs."

Rick Haverty, director of infrastructure, University of Rochester Medical Center, said: "With CommVault Simpana software, we can fully protect 42 applications that are essential to patient care, along with hundreds of other applications that are equally important to operations. At HIMSS 13, we describe how CommVault’s unified data management solution accelerates critical backups of large amounts of data, while ensuring rapid recovery and retention of vital patient files and electronic health records as dictated by hospital policies, the National Institute of Health, and Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizers."