Healthcare providers face the challenge of ensuring secure file sharing while allowing easy collaboration between teams and locations. A modern global file system can provide the solution, enabling doctors and staff to securely access and share patient records, improving patient care and reducing the risk of errors. PeerGFS, offered by Peer Software, provides end-to-end encryption and helps to protect against malicious activities, making it an ideal solution for healthcare organizations.
By offering real-time file locking to prevent accidental file overwrites and providing data redundancy, ensuring data is available in the event of an outage or disaster, PeerGFS is an affordable and reliable solution for healthcare professionals looking to improve performance, whilst ensuring the safety and convenience of their patients’ data.
- With sensitive patient data at stake, healthcare providers need a solution that can keep their files secure while also enabling easy collaboration across different teams and organizations. This can include medical records, imaging files, and other sensitive information that needs to be accessed by healthcare professionals across different locations.
- By implementing a modern global file system, doctors and staff members at each practice can securely access and share patient records with the other locations. For example, if a patient has a check-up at one of the satellite practices, the doctor can easily view the patient's medical history and records from any of the other practices, including any lab results or diagnostic imaging.
- This can improve patient care by ensuring that all healthcare providers involved in a patient's care have access to the same up-to-date information. It can also save time and reduce the risk of errors, as doctors don’t need to spend time coordinating with other practices to obtain records.
- Furthermore, if a patient needs to be referred to a specialist or receive care at the main hospital, their records can be easily shared with those healthcare providers as well, enabling seamless transitions of care and reducing the need for duplicate tests or procedures.
The PeerGFS global file service from Peer Software can provide end-to-end encryption, granular access controls, and other security features that healthcare organizations need to protect their data.
Let’s expand our example:
One of our customers in the United Kingdom ran a couple of GP (General Practitioner) doctor’s surgeries. These were affiliated with a general hospital run by an NHS Trust. The GP doctors could be working at one surgery in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. The PeerGFS modern global file service monitored the file storage, both at each of the surgeries and at the general hospital so that whenever a file was created or modified, that file event was immediately copied from the location it occurred to each of the other locations. That provided a copy of the data at each location that was constantly kept up to date.
It meant that when GPs travelled between surgeries, their latest files were already there waiting for them.
Moreover, the data was shared with the general hospital such that if a patient required less general and more specialised hospital treatment, all of the relevant patient data would already be there too, for the hospital doctors and clinicians to access.
To prevent a file from being accidently overwritten when two or more doctors tried to modify their local copy of a file at the same time, the global file system included real-time file locking. This meant that only one doctor could edit a file at a time. Others, regardless of which location they were situated would still be able to read the contents of the file, but it would be read-only. So, all would have access to the content of the file, but only one would be able to make changes at a time.
And from a performance perspective, having fast, local access to the latest data is always going to be faster than accessing them remotely across a site-to-site network or the Internet.
In the healthcare industry, it’s so important for systems like this to be robust, reliable and available. People’s lives can literally depend on a doctor’s ability to have timely access to their patient data.
A global file system can help in the event of a disaster or IT outage. For example, if file access at one of the doctor’s surgeries became unavailable, because of a storage failure or some other kind of outage, those users could be automatically switched to use the other surgery’s copy of the data, or even the files at the general hospital. In short, they could keep working during the outage using another copy of the data.
Healthcare providers need to be mindful of their budgets, so what does the convenience and safety provided by a modern global file system cost?
Every organisation’s IT infrastructure has nuances and uniqueness to it, so for indicative, no obligation pricing, the best thing to do is reach out to your local Peer representative. You can find your local Peer office at peersoftware.com/contact. You can of course, also get in touch with your preferred supplier or reseller.
In the healthcare industry, it’s so important for systems like this to be robust, reliable and available. People’s lives can literally depend on a doctor’s ability to have timely access to their patient data.
You can find out more information and optionally request a free, no obligation trial
Spencer Allingham
A thirty-year veteran within the IT industry, Spencer has progressed from technical support and e-commerce development through IT systems management, and for ten years, technical pre-sales engineering. Focusing much of that time on the performance and utilization of enterprise storage, Spencer has spoken on these topics at VMworld, European VMUGS and TechUG conferences, as well as at Gartner conferences.
At Peer Software, Spencer assists customers with deployment and configuration of PeerGFS, Peer’s Global File Service for multi-site, multi-platform file synchronization.
