Healthcare: RSFH, CoreLink, Online Tech, IBM's Watson

It feels as though we're seeing more announcements about healthcare-related data center services. Here's a roundup of announcements from the past week.

Construction Starts on Data Center for Charleston Hospital: Roper St. Francis Healthcare (RSFH) broke ground this week on a new data center on a 24-acre site located in North Charleston. The facility will consolidate approximately 40 tons of equipment that will provide electronic communications to more than 100 RSFH facilities throughout a nine-county area. "This data center will provide the muscle behind Roper St. Francis Healthcare’s long-term strategic plan,” said David Dunlap, President and CEO, Roper St. Francis Healthcare. “With electronic medical records becoming fully integrated at our facilities and doctors’ offices, this data center will mean increased capacity for our communications systems which will in turn lead to greater efficiency for the almost 300,000 people we serve annually.”

HealthCare Strategies Chooses CoreLink for IT Infrastructure - CoreLink Data Centers has announced the addition of HealthCare Strategies (HCS) to its client roster. The Columbia, Md.-based healthcare management company provides sponsoring companies and their employees services that leverage clinical data-based analytics, predictive modeling and patient-focused processes to deliver the highest quality medical care, while substantially lowering employers’ health benefit costs. HCS said its decision was guided by CoreLink’s strong healthcare IT industry presence and the confidence it has in CoreLink as Government disaster recovery related regulations place greater emphasis on healthcare providers’ compliance with new provisions of the Health Information for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009.

IT Management Group Selects Online Tech for HIPAA - The IT Management Group has selected Online Tech's data centers to assist clients with HIPAA, SOX and PCI compliance. By partnering with Online Tech, the IT Management Group can give their clients the security of SAS 70, SSAE 16 (SOC 1) and SOC 2 audited data centers to protect data from threats while meeting national privacy standards. Online Tech can offer IT Management Group healthcare clients the opportunity to meet HIPAA compliance by hosting their applications or storing their data in an independently audited HIPAA data center. For example, one client who offers a doctor-to-doctor commerce web application hosts their entire web application on Online Tech's managed servers. Another client, a health insurance provider, uses Online Tech's managed servers to store all of their data and run their remote desktop environment.

IBM Forms Watson Healthcare Advisory Board - IBM announced this week that it has formed a new Watson Healthcare Advisory Board, which includes medical leaders with expertise in areas such as primary care, oncology, biomedical informatics and medical innovation. The board will provide IBM with insights on healthcare issues that could be positively impacted by Watson technology adoption. The advisory board will specifically focus on medical industry trends, clinical imperatives, regulatory considerations, privacy concerns, and patient and clinician expectations around the Watson technology and how it can be incorporated into clinician workflows.