Bridgehead Software, the healthcare data management software specialist, will next week unveil interim research results from the storage virtualization portion of its Data Management Healthcheck 2010. BridgeHead spokespeople at booth 831 at World of Health IT in Barcelona will be on hand to:

• discuss the urgent and growing need for integrated use and management of electronic patient records (EPR)
• share interim results from the Data Management Healthcheck 2010 research on cloud technologies and storage virtualization
• demonstrate BridgeHead Software's line of vendor-agnostic data management software solutions for hospitals and healthcare organisations of all sizes
• describe the benefits of vendor-agnostic (i.e., not linked to a particular imaging vendor) solutions for streamlining storage and management of electronic patient records (EPR) and improving healthcare delivery

"Healthcare storage virtualization [HSV] embodies our ethos of supporting and underpinning the EPR and empowering IT at healthcare organisations of all sizes to meet their growing storage needs without compromising on current hardware brand or media type," said Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software. "Our vendor- and platform-agnostic Healthcare Data Management [HDM] suite is scalable to the size, environment and forward strategy of any healthcare organisation. Healthcare storage virtualization is an essential part of this package because it creates a flexible storage management framework that separates applications from the storage device, thereby allowing multiple applications to tap into the same resources and increasing overall utilization of the storage resource."

Effective use and management of electronic patient data promises to be one of the foremost themes of this year's World of Health IT (WoHIT), taking place in Barcelona on the 15 - 18 March. With an education programme covering such topics as "effective use of patient data" and "empowering the patient through information delivery," WoHIT 2010 will present opportunities to learn about technological solutions to improve patient care, streamline EPR management, and reduce not only hospital costs, but also carbon emissions.

The BridgeHead Software Data Management Healthcheck, available online at http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com/hdm-survey, was launched early in February to investigate best practices hospitals should adopt to effectively manage, store and archive their exponentially growing volumes of electronic patient data. Respondents get the chance to win a range of prizes, including the new Apple iPad.

Interim results from the cloud portion of the Data Management Healthcheck were unveiled earlier this month at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Preliminary findings revealed that over 80 percent of healthcare organizations viewed cloud security as the most significant factor influencing their decisions about cloud storage.