CASE STUDY: Hitachi Data Systems / SingHealth
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Industry: Health Care |
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The speed and reliability with which medical records are made available to health-care professionals can make a critical impact on a patient’s conditions and life. This is significantly so for SingHealth, the largest health-care group in Singapore. To date, SingHealth manages 1.5TB of medical records belonging to 2.2 million patients who visit any of its three hospitals, five specialty centres and nine polyclinics islandwide.
With a focus on patient-centric health care, SingHealth was driven and determined to improve the efficiency of its Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Image Management System (IMS) by consolidating disparate systems used to create, store, retrieve, and archive patient records. The aim was to make the medical records available instantly, without compromising data integrity. Such a system inevitably affects the level of medical care delivered by 1,500 doctors and 5,000 nurses on a daily basis.
With its previous IT setup, SingHealth faced challenges that required an innovative solution:
- The storage for both EMR and IMS resided on two separate modular storage area networks (SANs). These SANs did not provide sufficiently high availability to support the increasingly complex EMR and IMS functions as the organization grew.
- “Unplanned” downtime sometimes lasted for several hours. With every system downtime, health-care workers had to manually retrieve hardcopies of records—a laborious, inefficient and time consuming process that caused productivity loss.
- Updating the storage system with software patches required additional “planned” downtime.
Hitachi Solution Delivers 100 Percent Availability
SingHealth began considering a system upgrade in October 2004. By adopting a forward-looking and innovative approach, the group decided on a new concept, storage virtualization, to encompass its data management requirements. “The idea is to have a simplified, central point of management for multiple tiers of storage,” SingHealth’s Group Chief Technology Officer Fong Choon Khin said. “This allows us to start at a manageable cost base and add storage as needed.”
At that time, Hitachi TagmaStore™ Universal Storage Platform from Hitachi Data Systems was the only enterprisegrade storage virtualization solution ready for immediate implementation. The Hitachi design does not introduce another layer of complexity between the application server and storage. Moreover, it does not reside in the Fibre Channel SAN and is not dependent on the SAN for virtualization, which allows the IBM® FastT, SATA, and tape systems already owned by SingHealth to benefit from the virtualization.
SingHealth decided on the Hitachi Data Systems project in February 2005. “It was not a difficult decision,” said Fong. “Hitachi Data Systems was the only vendor that offered a proven storage virtualization solution together with a commitment of 100 percent data availability on the Fibre Channel SAN. The solution the company offered was perfectly tuned to our business needs, without compromising our existing IT investments.”
SingHealth ordered two Universal Storage Platforms tiered with midrange Hitachi Thunder 9520V™ workgroup modular storage. In line with SingHealth’s disaster recovery policies, the built-in universal replication capabilities of the systems effectively removed the possibility of a single point of failure. Information lifecycle management was also taken care of on the tiered storage architecture, which encompassed Fibre Channel disks, SATA disks, and tape drives.
To ensure 100 percent availability on the Fibre Channel SAN, the Hitachi Data Systems team put in place proactive monitoring of the Universal Storage Platform implementation. Hitachi Data Systems virtualization technology made migration smooth and easy: The implementation took only two months from start to finish.
Application Optimized Virtualization
In its approach to virtualized storage, Hitachi Data Systems employs Application Optimized Storage™ solutions from Hitachi Data Systems. This means the storage system is “application aware” and will route data to storage devices according to priority of the application storing the data. For example, patient data that needs to be accessed quickly can be directed to the high-performance Fibre Channel disk (tier 1), while less urgent data is routed to the SATA storage system (tier 3).
Hitachi virtualization software manages the Universal Storage Platforms’ internal storage hardware, as well as that of the entire SAN, as multiple tiers. This optimizes the storage infrastructure to dynamically meet the process requirements of SingHealth’s EMR and IMS system—from maintaining critical patient records to managing CT scans. Virtualization has enabled the different departments to have their own logical partition within SingHealth, all within a single storage device.
“Using the Hitachi Data Systems Application Optimized Storage approach, SingHealth has successfully addressed two critical organizational needs: the simplification and business continuity of its EMR and IMS systems,” said Ignatius Lee, director of Hitachi Data Systems Singapore. “The tiered storage platform accomplished simplified management by centralizing control using software, assuring the upkeep and continuity of data movement as well as protection and replication across heterogeneous tiers of storage.”
Virtualizing multiple tiers of storage means SingHealth can start at a manageable cost base while simultaneously reducing risk and improving services. Furthermore, the Hitachi Data Systems virtualization solution was the only one that allowed SingHealth to continue using its IBM FastT systems, leading to substantial cost savings.
Built for Easy Expansion
In real terms, better and more stable application response time means doctors can access their patients’ medical records at the right time to support better decision-making. They can more effectively pull out relevant data in their doctor-patient consultations. “We are completely satisfied with the results,” said Fong. “The Hitachi Data Systems team was proactive and extremely responsive to our exacting requirements.”
“SingHealth’s IT staff no longer has to manage several storage applications, which are now centralized into one management interface that is part of the Universal Storage Platforms. Expensive duplicate films are a thing of the past, because CT scans, Xray results, and other digitized images can now be retrieved from the data repository in seconds. The system’s on-the-fly microcode updating also means zero downtime on the Universal Storage Platforms.
Moving forward, SingHealth’s Digital Health Ecosystem could put new demands on SingHealth’s storage architecture. “Private practitioners may wish to integrate their patient records on the national database, and patients will be offered a fuller continuum of care,” said Fong. “The Hitachi TagmaStore Universal Storage Platforms we have in place will allow us to expand easily as these and other requirements arise. They have helped simplify and optimize our storage setup without compromising performance.”
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation
Corporate Headquarters
750 Central Expressway
Santa Clara,California 95050-2627
U.S.A.
Phone: 1 408 970 1000
www.hds.com
info@hds.com
Asia Pacific and Americas
750 Central Expressway
Santa Clara,California 95050-2627
U.S.A.
Phone: 1 408 970 1000
info@hds.com
Europe Headquarters
Sefton Park
Stoke Poges
Buckinghamshire SL2 4HD
United Kingdom
Phone:+ 44 (0)1753 618000
info.eu@hds.com
