As hospitals look for a cost-efficient way to fulfill Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-related mandates and meet ever-growing storage needs, the formulas don’t have to be as complicated as Russell Crowe’s mathematical calculations in A Beautiful Mind. Unlike the movie’s main character, no Nobel Prize awaits you for your work. However, wise choices in storage solutions will impact workflow, and the resulting efficiencies will be noteworthy.

The typical questions surrounding storage still include whether to have a server attached approach or network attached storage (NAS), and whether to have local or offsite storage. Choices involve whether to manage the storage internally or pool it across multiple servers.

As hospitals continue to move away from a departmental mentality to an enterprise approach, storage solutions are becoming more mainstream and off the shelf. “CIOs are starting to look at more enterprise-wide strategies as opposed to storage strategies that fit within the department, so . . . right now we see the evolution of RAID [redundant array of inexpensive disks] technology really driving a revolution in the storage arena in terms of the way people manage images as well as the way people manage their overall enterprise requirement,” says Bob Cooke, Agfa Corp.’s (Ridgefield Park, N.J.) general manager of IMPAX business.

In the past, people were compensating for the high price of magnetic storage media with removable jukebox-type technology because the price per megabyte was not very attractive at the magnetic level. So departments were looking at purchasing the bare minimum of RAID technology and augmenting that to meet their full storage requirements with magneto-optical disks, tape jukeboxes and CD libraries.

Please refer to the February 2002 issue for the complete story. For information on article reprints, contact Martin St. Denis