By Healthcare Facilities Today

The volume of data has grown significantly in the few years at the Samaritan Medical Center, Watertown, N.Y. Because of this, the 294-bed community hospital is streamlining the ways it manages and backs up its data, according to an article on the Healthcare Informatics website.

Samaritan's data volume has grown from about 12 terabytes seven years ago to roughly 120 terabytes today, according to Jeff Woods, the hospital’s technical services manager, with much of the growth in the last two years.

"Prior to 2005, the systems we had in place were primarily non-clinical—back-end systems, administrative and financial,” the article quotes Woods as saying.

That changed with electronic health record (EHR) implementation, which has led to a large increase in clinical data. In the last three years, the Samaritan’s IT department has doubled or tripled the amount of storage capability it needs to keep on hand, Woods said.

According to the article, the acceptable window for downtime has diminished from a business continuity perspective. Because tape backup-and-restore is time-consuming, Samaritan has moved to put more primary backup on spinning disk.

Samaritan also uses a virtualized environment, so its clinicians can stay mobile, moving from computer to computer. The large growth in the volume of data from various applications has led Samaritan to consolidate its backup operations.

In June, the hospital consolidated the four disparate backup systems into a single healthcare data management platform.

Read the article.