What if we could look at a patient’s complete medical history, the statistics from their smartwatch, plus the records of people most like them in the world to drive understandings and predictions about their health?
This idea of recommending for one—known as Precision Medicine—would provide retrospection analysis, insight into conditions and predictive analysis of future requirements based on a patient’s current lifestyle. Precision medicine would allow doctors and medical staff to determine the best course of action and predict how to help patients down the road or steer them away from potentially hazardous paths.
Current medical diagnostics constrained by individuals compared to the “average patient” and a brief analysis of surface symptoms. This could be significantly improved by introducing more data—specifically records of patients from around the world. By identifying a group of people a patient is most related to —based on climate, diagnoses, and medicines— doctors can use this information to make quicker and better diagnoses, and potentially predict health outcomes.
The challenge? This process would be very data-intensive, and concerns about patient data privacy would need to be addressed. The fact is that, currently, the bandwidth and technology infrastructure required is not in place to support this level of data-intensive analysis in real time. At best, a patient compared to others within the hospital they go to, and even that process would take an exceptional amount of time to compute and determine a recommendation.
Part of the reason is that processor technology—essentially—stopped getting better a while ago. Up until now, computers have always evolved to keep up with our increasing demands, but their fundamental design based on the same architecture that was put in place more than 60 years ago, and that architecture is starting to hit its limits.
The challenge in computing has always been building enough memory to keep up with increasing computing requirements. Memory has always been the scarce resource. However, HPE envisages a future where computers are designed to put the data at the core. Utilizing Memory-Driven Computing, HPE foresees that systems around the globe would be able to assimilate patient data, anonymously, and allow medical professionals to access information from a distributed matrix of anonymized data in real-time.
Role of composable infrastructure in improving patient care
HPE Synergy is the world’s first platform architected for composable infrastructure. Whereas traditional infrastructure management involves compute, storage, and fabric silos with their software management tools, Synergy integrates software-defined intelligence into the hardware itself. With HPE Synergy, compute, storage and fabric are provisioned together enabling application and service delivery through a single interface that precisely composes (and recomposes) infrastructures into any combination at near-instant speeds.
HPE Synergy is ideal for a DevOps approach, as well as traditional IT, as it eliminates time-consuming provisioning processes that often delay projects for weeks or months. The composable infrastructure allows the EMIS-hosted infrastructure teams to provide new services and capabilities rapidly to the software developers.
How HPE Synergy helped EMIS Health
EMIS Health is one of the UK’s leading provider of innovative healthcare technologies. UK’s leading healthcare software and service provider, from clinical management systems to health analytics tools, is well known for creating GP clinical trial systems. Its data centers store 40 million patients records which can be actively accessed by up to 60,000 GPs at any one time.
The Problem
Clinical practices are evolving faster than ever before, so EMIS Health must acclimatize to these changes or fall behind. EMIS must be prepared to shift resources quickly when prospects arise to develop new healthcare services and applications.
Previously, EMIS’ test and development systems were housed in legacy data center infrastructure that was heavily dependent on custom-designed software. EMIS faced continuing challenges with scalability and agility. The traditional data center architecture and legacy design processes were limiting its ability to act quickly and meet physicians’ needs.
The Solution: HPE Composable infrastructure
The solution was to replace the heritage architecture with HPE Synergy. This equips the EMIS DevOps team with the ability to respond more quickly to the business demands of the healthcare community.
HPE Synergy is ideal for a DevOps approach, as well as traditional IT, as it eliminates time-consuming provisioning processes that often delay projects for weeks or months. The composable infrastructure allows the EMIS-hosted infrastructure teams to provide new services and capabilities rapidly to the software developers.
EMIS Health’s DevOps teams can now access servers in near real-time allowing them to respond immediately to business needs. Dave Gee, The company has had quite a ground-breaking DevOps
push to integrate engineering with engineering software. HPE Synergy has allowed EMIS to stop using individual human resource time to build out robust pieces of tin and automate that process. This allows the company to commit those members of staff to work on incidents and any problems in the infrastructure and improve the services as well.
The Synergy platform allows EMIS to be more flexible in the way that it deploys infrastructure. Composable infrastructure makes it easier for EMIS to rapidly scale out infrastructure, as well as using the storage module in the Synergy frame because the company can also integrate their existing 3PAR storage arrays, which means expanding the services it provides.
Takeaways
Healthcare providers can now move more quickly to deliver potentially life-saving healthcare services. The aim is to improve efficiency, improve the service and improve patient care. If healthcare providers can build facilities quicker, then they can save the money and put new ground-breaking functionality in front of patients.
HPE Synergy has enabled a new “share your own” records service, where patients can choose to give a care provider 24 hours access to a particular part of their medical record. The quicker innovations like this can be brought into the healthcare system the more significant the benefit for everyone. Ultimately, this HPE Synergy deployment shows that composable infrastructure is winning. The software-defined flexibility and DevOps push for new services that this enables is improving patient care and also saving money.
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Audrey Cox
WW OEM Communications & Brand Awareness
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
