Data center upgrade essential to enhanced patient care: as digital applications expand to physicians, nurses and patients, healthcare providers require greater data availability and security to reduce error rates, risks and costs

Health Management Technology, Oct, 2004 by Johnathan Donovan

Although many contributors to the total cost of a data center are difficult to scale with time, including such upfront expenses as space improvement, facility switchgear and engineering costs, knowledgeable data center managers conservatively estimate a savings of upward of 50 percent from scalable technology, with approximately two-thirds coming from capital allocation and one-third from operating expenses. With the lifetime total cost of ownership of a high-availability data center estimated at $120,000 per rack, the potential savings, by any measure, is considerable.

Healthcare IT leaders today are recognizing the importance of paying adequate attention to their NCPI and successfully utilizing this new approach. Others still in the planning stages of NCPI should visit their healthcare peers who have recently built or upgraded their data centers to see how they dealt with these issues. Physicians, nurses and patients who depend upon this IT infrastructure will all be much better off when it is built with foresight from the NCPI level or "from the ground up."

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Johnathan Donovan is director of global healthcare marketing for American Power Conversion Corp., West Kingston, R.I. Contact him at john.donovan@apcc.com.