Dell Healthcare SmartSite: Mobile clinical computing

The Healthcare Enterprise Survey revealed that hospital IT executives at small and medium-sized hospitals believe that EMRs, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), capacity for storing digital images, needs of affiliated physicians and business intelligence will increase demand on their datacenters by an average of 20 to 50 percent over the next two years.

While many small and medium hospitals anticipate they will spend more on IT next year, they also describe datacenter challenges that Dell believes will make it difficult for them to efficiently manage new information demands. These challenges include a lack of standards, security, extended server refresh cycles and complexity created by a large number of servers and vendors and limited use of virtualization.

Lack of datacenter standards complicate the information sharing within and between hospitals necessary for diagnosis, decision making and coordination and management of patient care. With refresh cycles of five years or more, small and medium hospitals rely on servers that are less efficient and cost more to run and manage as they prepare for a significant increase in data over the next two years.

Without aggressive adoption of virtualization, hospitals that simply add servers and storage to their datacenters to meet growing data demand will end up perpetuating the complexity that already consumes a majority of their IT resources, leaving less of their budgets for strategic priorities even as they invest more in IT.

Now is the time for small and medium hospitals to prepare their datacenters to handle strategic reform and healthcare priorities and for government leaders to consider the significant contribution these hospitals can make to an information infrastructure that streamlines administration, improves diagnosis and decision-making at the point of care and coordination and quality of patient care across the healthcare system.

Eliminate Complexity:Adopt standards-based technology and an open and flexible architecture across the datacenter.
Invest, but Invest Wiselyin more efficient and scalable systems and management tools that reduce maintenance costs and have scaling capacity.
Virtualize Now to Prevent Server and Storage Proliferation:Accelerate server and storage virtualization to scale efficiently, minimize maintenance costs and free up budget and IT resources for strategic HIT priorities.
Consider Alternative Models:Look at SaaS models for applications with likelihood for substantial growth or with large bandwidth requirements-- such as electronic medical records systems.
Automate Routine Management Tasksto free up IT resources for strategic priorities.
Tier Data Effectively to reduce hardware costs, secure and meet data availability requirements.