Trends in Health Care IT: Digital Clinical Systems & the Impact on Data Center Management

Trends in Health Care IT: Digital Clinical Systems & the Impact on Data Center Management examines the scientific research and healthcare industry demands on mission critical infrastructure. Today's healthcare and research organizations require a mission critical infrastructure that satisfies the needs of professionals who rely increasingly on fast and secure access to information and communications.


In the modern hospital, virtually all clinical functions are supported in the data center. From PAC's (digital radiology), digital pharmacy, digital medical records, and digital pathology, to doctors with wireless tablet PC's at the bedside, the health of the patient is tied to the reliability of the data center. Loss of life is always at the forefront of everyone's mind, but downtime has other impacts as well. Convergence of technology and tighter integrations have forced today's hospital data center to support non-typical application and data servers for systems such as nurse call, infant protection, security, and clinical messaging engines. Planning the space and support requirements in the data center as well as determining the correct infrastructure for delivery and access to the information is critical.

Learning Objectives

• The rapid deployment of digital clinical systems is having a huge impact on the data center. What are the issues, and how can they be addressed.
• Virtualization in the data center can help, but how much? Projected savings can be quantified.
• There are different levels of risk related to disaster recovery. Developing a plan for levels of DR can result big savings.

About the Speaker

R. Stephen Spinazzola
Vice President and Firwide Director, MEP Engineering Studio
RTKL


As Vice President and firmwide Director of RTKL's MEP Engineering Studio, Steve Spinazzola offers more than 27 years of experience in both mechanical design and project management on corporate, mission-critical, educational, health and science, retail, and institutional projects. Steve holds a Bachelor of Architectural Engineering degree from Pennsylvania State University. Steve is a registered professional engineer in more than 30 states, and is co-inventor of an advanced data center cooling technology that has six patents and is currently being deployed in data centers all over the world.