Healthcare organisations are having to deal with a wide array of data coming into their IT systems to serve an ever-growing list of needs. This may be for reporting, analytics, workflow automation, clinical decision support and any other number of initiatives to drive improved patient outcomes. All require suitable handling of the data, including compliance with data retention policies that can span from months to years. Storing large amounts of data for long periods of time in a secure, reliable and scalable environment is often too expensive for all but the most mission critical workflows.

New Amadeus CORE extends your health organisation’s integration engine with secure and scalable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage. From an existing Rhapsody™Integration Engine or a similar engine you can securely batch or stream structured, semi-structured and unstructured health data into Amadeus CORE for both archiving and active use. Data is tagged intelligently with metadata so that it can easily be queried and accessed via industry standard encrypted RESTful API and SQL/BI interfaces.

Amadeus CORE is a HIPAA compliant and HITRUST certified solution that enables healthcare organisations to retain the data for future use (such as to troubleshoot and resolve data integration issues, seed new systems or for reporting and analytics) and comply with long-term data retention policies. Within the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 there are many policy and documentation requirements. These include rules around data retention, requiring data to be stored for a minimum of 6 years from the date of creation or the date when it was last in effect.

Metadata – Information about information

To make effective use of the stored data you need to be able to easily retrieve the data items of interest, and to understand its characteristics and attributes. Any custom metadata that is supplied at the time of ingestion is persisted against the data item, but Amadeus CORE can also automatically extract metadata from the content of known, common healthcare formats, for example V2 HL7 messages. This enables search and retrieval of the stored data by a variety of parameters, as well as statistical analysis to extract operational insights; for example, volume over time for different types of messages, data quality by source system, or traffic patterns and trends etc.

Optimised storage to balance cost and performance

When storing large amounts of data for up to years at a time, cost becomes an important concern that needs careful balancing against performance requirements. Does all the data need to be accessible at speed all the time, or can retrieval for very old datasets take a little longer? What kind of storage technology is best for the type of data being stored? Will the system need to handle spikes in data volume?

Amadeus CORE utilises secure, durable object storage for data archiving, providing optimised and low-cost long-term storage. Elastic scalability means that additional computer power and storage capacity are available on demand, taking away the need to forecast in unpredictable settings or to purchase and operate redundant hardware just in case. You can also select at design time different storage technology options to suit your data and use cases.

Security and reliability

Amadeus CORE is housed in AWS infrastructure that has strong security and privacy safeguards in place so that data is protected both in transit and at rest, with full traceability. High availability mechanisms and operational excellence deliver data redundancy, disruption mitigations and automatic failovers in the event of recovery, with minimal service disruptions. To achieve a similar level of protection and reliability would be cost prohibitive for most healthcare organisations.

In summary, there is a lot to consider when handling and storing large amounts of data over time. Amadeus CORE extends your health organisation’s integration engine with secure and scalable AWS cloud storage. It provides a flexible and easy to use solution that can remove the engineering, administrative and operational overhead that comes with long-term healthcare data storage.

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