Health Business

The Health Care industry’s data storage needs are increasing rapidly. Safe storage is critical and clinicians need access to medical data from many locations. Data structure incompatibilities between clinical modalities introduce further problems.

Murdoch Mactaggart reports on the importance of infrastructure.

The output from specialist imaging devices such as CT or MRI scanners or even simple X-rays can generate substantial files. Further, medical re cords need to be retained for a patient’s lifetime and with increasing aging and chronic conditions storage needs can be significant.

Nor is medically-related data normally neatly filed away and accessible. Different departments will hold specialist bits of information relating to particular patients and there can often be relevant non-clinical information, email comments from one physician to another or perhaps older paper documents which are still current.

“There are islands of information all over the place.” says Mark Clark, Director Healthcare EMEA, Hitachi Data Systems. “Consolidating that fragmented data into a more manageable and accessible source brings considerable benefits, both for hospital efficiency and patient waiting time. That needs the correct information infrastructure, however, and that’s what we focus on.”

Standards can vary
There’s a further problem in how vendors interpret what are meant to be interoperability standards such as DICOM or HL7.

“Standards such as DICOM exist in healthcare but the flow of information from a variety of modalities and instruments into a PACS system or directly attached archive creates its own problems.” explains Clark “PACS systems and modalities were not originally designed to interoperate with diverse systems and so can inhibit processes to streamline workflow and share information between the enterprise healthcare applications. Hitachi has solved this problem by introducing an integration and data management infrastructure capability which allows multiple disparate sources to exchange data regardless of where the data originates and in a way which is active to the applications and passive to the data.”

Rapid access to information
Large file sizes and slow or busy networks can also impact on how quickly data can be got to where it’s needed. In the past it might have taken a week to order X-ray plates for a patient’s visit but clinicians now expect images to be available instantly on whatever workstation they’re using.

“We can get full fidelity images of any kind to a clinician in seconds by using efficient pixel streaming techniques.” explains Clark. “We do not actually download the whole image data but stream the result after image processing on the central server.” That’s particularly useful where small bandwidth networks or the internet itself are involved and gives much greater flexibility of location. That improves workflow and the diagnostic process and helps bring the health community closer together. Ultimately, this is better for the patient.”

Secure backup is critical
One of the consequences of the Hurricane Katrina disaster was the loss of the medical records of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were taking treatment where it might be critical for their future wellbeing that details such as radiation doses given were known accurately. Perhaps the circumstances were exceptional but it seems clear that failure to secure and backup records properly were among the many other administrative failures. Add in the importance of data integrity – you don’t really want important information to be modified arbitrarily – and it’s clear that protecting data from loss, change and illicit access is a vital element in managing medical information.

“Ultimately it’s about having the correct infrastructure in place,” says Clark. “Hospitals are increasingly investing in open standards based infrastructure. This enables scalability, flexibility to change and brings freedom of application choice without vendor lock-in. You can mix clinical and non-clinical information, images from different departments and different modalities, but still make them easily and quickly available by using our virtualisation techniques. It’s really about improving workflow, reducing cost and ultimately making things better not only for the medical staff but also for the patients.”

Hitachi and the Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project (HGP) is a massive, international scientific research project involving geneticists in the US, UK, China, Japan, France and Germany. Its initial aim was to determine the more than three billion base pairs in the human genome and to identify all the genes there. In 2000 it reached a major milestone when it published a working draft of the genome, the complete version appearing in 2003.

All the relevant information from the HGP is published freely on the internet. A researcher investigating a particular disease with a possible genetic aspect can readily learn what other researchers have written about those genes and can examine in detail structure, occurrence in other species, connections with different genes and so on.

To handle public access to this huge and steadily growing amount of data, the Human Genome Center at the University of Tokyo, one of the partners in the HGP, has set up the HiGet data retrieval system built on Hitachi’s scalable object-orientated (but also relational) DBMS, HiRDB. This provides full-text searching of some 46 million records to date, using parallel processing techniques to make the searching very fast and to avoid the problems of slow-down typically resulting when numbers increase.

Quotes
 “Hospitals have islands of information all over the place”
Mark Clark
“We can get full fidelity images ... to a clinician in seconds using pixel streaming”
Mark Clark
“Ultimately it’s about having the correct infrastructure in place”
Mark Clark
It’s about improving workflow, reducing cost and ultimately making things better for everyone”
Mark Clark