Compellent Fluid Data Storage Provides Foundation for Hospital's Leading Use of Electronic Medical Records

   For Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, having the right data available means it can provide superior care for its tens of thousands of inpatient and outpatient visits each year.

At the heart of Burke's IT infrastructure are electronic medical records (EMR), a picture archiving communication system (PACS) and healthcare information management systems that handle patients' clinical data, as well as billing, pharmacy, materials management and accounting. Burke CIO Ken Kupetsky needed a flexible, automated and scalable storage system to support the massive growth of electronic records, clinical documents and images and replace the aging HP storage infrastructure that could not keep up. Kupetsky also wanted to improve Burke's disaster recovery (DR) capabilities, as restoring deleted or lost data was difficult and time-consuming and impacted the staff's ability to care for patients.

After considering a number of different solutions, Kupetsky chose the Compellent (NYSE: CML) SAN as the foundation for a virtualized infrastructure with DR capabilities. Integrating Compellent Fluid Data features such as thin provisioning and automated tiered storage with VMware technology, Burke virtualized 90 percent of its data center. The Compellent SAN also opened the door to new functionality and cost savings, such as the ability add capacity as needed without downtime, monitor storage resources online and cut data recovery time from hours to minutes.

"We knew one of the keys to enhancing our patient care capabilities was to modernize our data storage infrastructure and virtualize end-to-end to ensure clinical systems such as our EMR application and MediServe are online 24/7," said Kupetsky. "The automation of the Compellent SAN saves us $80,000 annually in management costs and allows us to expand our storage or recover data in the middle of the day in a few minutes, without impacting clinicians or patients. We're proud to have achieved EMR Stage 6 certification for our IT services, and Compellent Fluid Data was a big part of our success."

The Stage 6 EMR certification from the HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) recognizes hospitals that have made significant advancements in their IT capabilities, placing them at the forefront of EMR technology adoption and use in patient care. Previously, it took hours to expand data volumes for applications such as EMR, during which time clinicians were without access to systems. Now, Burke's IT staff leverages Compellent thin provisioning to add capacity and upgrade to new software while patient data remains online. Using automated snapshots, Kupetsky cut disaster recovery from an initial time of six to 12 hours down to 15 minutes for full restoration of the digital records systems. The decreased storage administration time has allowed Kupetsky to avoid hiring staff as well as implement IT projects that were not previously considered, such as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for three outpatient facilities.

Kupetsky is also using Compellent automated tiered storage software to intelligently move data between three tiers of SAS and SATA drives, depending on frequency of patient visits. Kupetsky reports that automated tiered storage has reduced long-term high-performance disk costs by reserving the high-performance tier for only the most active and critical data.

"Healthcare organizations are always striving to provide better patient care and often find that improvements to their data storage can lead to better application performance and more efficient management of critical patient information," said Matt Durkin, director of healthcare business development at Compellent. "Burke Rehab Hospital is just one example of healthcare providers using the Compellent Fluid Data solution to increase IT flexibility and manage nearly limitless data growth through virtualization, automated data management and comprehensive disaster recovery."

Fluid Data Storage on Display at HIMSS 2011

Ken Kupetsky will attend the HIMSS show in Orlando, Fla. and present on his virtualization and disaster recovery initiative in the session titled, "Rehabbing IT Storage Pain Points and Protecting EMRs," on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011 at 1 p.m. EST in room 311A.

At HIMSS11, Compellent will be exhibiting its Fluid Data storage solution in booth #4173 from Feb. 20-24, 2011. Compellent storage experts will host a number of product demonstrations and showcase the Fluid Data architecture including automated tiered storage, thin provisioning, space-efficient snapshots and thin replication features.

Click to Tweet: Compellent provides virtual foundation for Burke Rehab Hospital to provide better patient care http://ow.ly/3ZgW0

Click to Tweet: Come check out #Compellent customer Burke Rehab Hospital discuss data center modernization project at #HIMSS11, 2/23 at 1 PM - Room 311A

Additional information:

• Learn about Compellent Fluid Data storage solutions for healthcare organizations
• Twitter newsfeed: @Compellent
• Compellent Facebook page
• "Around the Block" Blog
• Compellent Newsroom
• HIMSS Facebook page

About Compellent Compellent Technologies (NYSE: CML) provides Fluid Data storage solutions that automate the movement and management of data at a granular level, enabling organizations to constantly adapt to change, slash costs and secure information against downtime and disaster. This patented, built-in storage intelligence delivers significant efficiency, scalability and flexibility. With an all-channel sales network in 35 countries, Compellent is one of the fastest growing enterprise storage companies in the world. For more information and news, visit www.compellent.com and www.compellent.com/news.