Scottish health group cuts data storage costs

System holds more prescription details and boosts disaster recovery capabilities

The NHS National Service Scotland (NSS) has replaced its storage environment to cut costs and improve the management and retention of some 50 million prescriptions a day.

The NSS, the main management body for co-ordinating NHS service delivery in Scotland, has reduced its storage costs by 40 per cent, halved data storage query retrieval times to 30 seconds, and increased its capacity for data growth.

Martin Morrison, head of IT at NSS, says the new system is allowing the organisation to meet changing data requirements.

‘We had a change in retrieval demand where a number of initiatives, such as clinical governance, created the need to store and access up to seven years of data more efficiently,’ said Morrison.

‘We needed to improve the speed of retrieval, but the ability to do so reliably, without relying on human intervention, was key.’

The organisation has deployed two storage systems at separate sites from vendor EMC. It has increased the disaster recovery capabilities by replicating data in case it is lost.

The NSS is using EMC’s systems to manage the 50 million prescription items it deals with each day, and is migrating 700 million records held on disk.

The NSS now has the capacity to store 30 terabytes of data at each site to meet capacity forecasts for the next few years.

‘The new system enables a lot of users inside and outside the NSS to access systems that make use of the stored data more quickly, such as the counter-fraud teams or researchers who use the data for trend analysis,’ said Morrison.

‘And we are in the process of migrating dental and ophthalmic data as well as electronically received data this year.’

‘Other corporate initiatives look at medical records in general, and whether we extend use of the new systems is something we will look into in the future,’ he said.