BridgeHead Software Wins Storage Management Contract with The London Clinic

First Step to The London Clinic’s New IT
Infrastructure: Improve Data Availability and Speed up Disaster
Recovery Times

HC2011, The ICC
Birmingham, 5th April 2011  –  BridgeHead Software,
a leader in healthcare data and
storage management, has won a contract to provide data backup
and protection solutions to support The London
Clinic, the UK’s largest independently owned non-profit
hospital,  transition to a brand-new, interoperable IT
infrastructure.

The London Clinic has invested in
BridgeHead MediStore™, and
BridgeHead Integrated Disaster Recovery (BridgeHead IDR), to
support its existing investment in BridgeHead Integrated Serverless
Backup (ISB). BH MediStore® provides a central archive that
will free up storage resources and improve the availability of
patient data, while BridgeHead ISB/IDR will drastically shorten
backup windows, minimise downtime risk and improve recovery
times.

Mike Roberts, IT Director at The London Clinic said:
“It is rare to find a supplier, particularly one you
inherit rather than choose, who surprises you in terms of their
integrity, honesty, ability to collaborate, ‘can do’
attitude and willingness to help. BridgeHead Software is such an
organisation. And then there’s the technology. 
BridgeHead Software’s suite of products provides a
comprehensive platform for clinical and administrative data and
storage management. They already underpin our HIS in relation to
backup and DR – but their offering is so much more. I look
forward to continuing our partnership into the
future.”

The London Clinic plans to use BH MediStore to archive, then
manage and protect, up to 15TB of scanned data from its earlier
version of the MEDITECH healthcare information systems (HCIS). This
historical data will be stored on more cost effective media than
the expensive SAN device where it currently resides, hence freeing
up resources for the hosting of current patient information and
reducing the primary backup stream.

As data is written into the BH MediStore archive, it is indexed
(both meta-data and full-text indexing), making it easier for The
London Clinic to ensure clinical staff can search for and access
patient records when and where they are needed, without delay.
Files can also be de-duped and compressed, where possible, in
accordance with hospital policies.

Furthermore, as the data is written into the archive, multiple
copies of the data are automatically generated that can be
geo-dispersed, thereby enhancing The London Clinic’s overall
protection and further enabling its disaster recovery strategy.

Tony Tomkys, Director of Sales, EMEA, BridgeHead Software, said:
“What The London Clinic is doing with data is what
BridgeHead suggests all hospitals do: remove static data from the
primary backup stream and put it into a safer, more cost-effective
storage environment where it can be accessed by clinicians and
hospital staff when and where needed – as well as secured in
the event of a disaster or system outage. In this instance,
BridgeHead plays its role by ensuring patient records across all
systems – regardless of vendor – are quickly and easily
accessible, and that point-in-time replicas of patient data are
intelligently distributed, in line with hospital policies, to the
appropriate secondary storage (e.g. tape, disk, Cloud, even VTL),
as well as geo-dispersed for disaster recovery.”

The second step for The London Clinic is to provide ongoing,
comprehensive data protection for its new MEDITECH environment.
Consequently, it has also invested in BridgeHead IDR to complement
its existing BridgeHead ISB.

BridgeHead IDR is the only integrated data protection and
disaster recovery solution that can be used for MEDITECH HCIS
across all of its certified SAN environments. An existing
BridgeHead customer, The London Clinic has been using BridgeHead
ISB, a tape-based backup and disaster recovery strategy, to protect
data on its MEDITECH HCIS since 2009. By adopting BridgeHead IDR,
The London Clinic will gain the benefits of SAN-based data
replication and snapshotting. Furthermore, unlike generic backup,
replication and mirroring tools, BridgeHead ISB/IDR ensures that
the MEDITECH database is properly quiesced prior to the backup
process. Because of this, only ISB/IDR-based backups and replicas
can be relied on to be restored quickly and predictably –
every time – without time-consuming database analysis or
repair.

Using BridgeHead ISB/IDR, The London Clinic will be able to back
up data every six hours rather than once a day. BridgeHead ISB/IDR
will also enable The London Clinic to significantly reduce and
fine-tune Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives
– both of which are, as BridgeHead explains in a recent white
paper (“Healthcare
Disaster Recovery: Why Disaster Recovery is Different in
Healthcare”), crucial to the implementation of effective
healthcare disaster recovery strategies.

In future, The London Clinic plans to continue enhancing data
availability by bolstering the protection of all other data across
the hospital, including medical images from PACS and other systems
and administrative data, such as email, spreadsheets and word
processing documents. The London Clinic will also look into ways to
optimise the backup environment with archiving across the board,
incorporating better interoperability along the way. BridgeHead
Software will continue providing technological support and advice
throughout this process.

### Ends ###

Notes to Editors

Mike Roberts, IT Director at The London Clinic, will be
delivering a presentation – “Data Free At The Point Of
Need” – at the HC2011 Conference in the ICC in
Birmingham on Thursday 7th April from 13:30 until 14:00. This
presentation will explore the complexities of storing and managing
different types of healthcare data across various IT systems, while
also making that data available to clinicians at all times.

BridgeHead Software will be at the HC2011 Exhibition on Stand
157. If you would like to arrange a meeting with BridgeHead or Mike
Roberts at the event (or, if you will not be at HC2011, by
telephone), please contact John McCann, BridgeHead Software, +44
7789 684860,
john.mccann@bridgeheadsoftware.com.

In the recent white paper “Why Disaster
Recovery is Different in Healthcare” BridgeHead Software
explains why, from a data security and protection perspective,
healthcare needs to be treated differently from other
industries.

Media Contacts

UK and EMEA

Rose Ross (for BridgeHead Software)

Omarketing

+44 208 255 5225

rose@omarketing.co.uk

www.twitter.com/Rose_at_O

US

Joan Geoghegan (for BridgeHead Software)

Cavalier Communications

+1 978-371-3921 (office)

joan@cavalier-communications.com

www.twitter.com/JoanMGeoghegan

About BridgeHead Software

BridgeHead Software, the
Healthcare Storage Virtualization™ (HSV™) company,
offers a scalable, future-proof platform to overcome rising data
volumes and increasing storage costs while delivering peace of mind
around the access, availability and protection of critical
electronic patient data.

Trusted by more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide, BridgeHead
Software solves healthcare organisations’ backup, recovery
and archiving challenges. BridgeHead’s HSV solutions are
designed to operate with any hospital’s chosen software
applications and storage hardware, regardless of vendor. This
presents healthcare organisations with more choice, flexibility and
control over the way data is accessed, protected and managed. The
net effect – better utilisation of hardware resources and,
more importantly, the efficient distribution, availability and use
of vital healthcare data.

To learn more about BridgeHead Software, visit http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com

To follow BridgeHead Software on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/BridgeHeadHSV

About The London Clinic

• The London Clinic is the UK’s largest independent
  non-profit hospital

• 271 patient rooms and 12 operating theatres including dedicated
  endoscopy suites and a day surgery unit

• 24 hour consultant-led Intensive Care Unit with 11 beds

• As a registered charity and not-for-profit organisation, The
  London Clinic is able to continuously reinvest in the latest
  medical technology, facilities and clinical and nursing support

• Highly complex procedures in addition to routine surgery and
  medicine such as live donor liver and kidney transplants

• Located on Harley Street in the heart of London’s medical
  community

• Long-standing international reputation attracting leading
  consultants for nearly 80 years

For more information, please visit the website at www.thelondonclinic.co.uk

SOURCE