HIPAA News

University Hospital Birmingham Maximises Storage Optimisation and Compliance Benefits With Autonomy ZANTAZ

(Oct 30, 2007)-- ZANTAZ, an Autonomy company  and the leader in the archiving, eDiscovery and proactive Information Risk Management (IRM) markets, announced that the University Hospital Birmingham (UHB) has implemented Autonomy ZANTAZ' Enterprise Archiving Solution (EAS) to efficiently manage its rapidly growing email volumes to keep them in line with regulatory requirements. With EAS, UHB has shortened its email retrieval process from weeks to minutes. Autonomy ZANTAZ' partner, Essential Computing, was the systems integrator for the project.

University Hospital Birmingham employs over 6,500 and is one of the UK's largest and most innovative National Health Service (NHS) Trusts, as well as a highly respected teaching hospital. The number of emails sent and received by them has doubled year-on-year since 1999, reaching a total of four million messages in 2007. On the premise that the proliferation of email as a communication tool between doctors, nurses and consultants would continue at the same rate, the trust's IT services team needed an intelligent solution that would enable them to securely and efficiently store, manage and retrieve messages.

Stephen Chilton, deputy director of ICT at UHB explains: "While there are no specific regulations governing the retention of email messages in NHS organisations, there were a number of other drivers for our implementation, which had the added benefit of helping us to comply with wider regulations such as the Data Protection Act, Investigatory Powers Act, Telecommunications Regulations and Freedom of Information Act. Our performance statistics show that since implementing the archiving system end-user performance has been enhanced and demand on core storage has been curtailed significantly. What's more, a far cry from the previously painful and long-winded process of retrieving emails, IT services can now respond to email retrieval requests within minutes, rather than weeks, which frees up our time for more strategic activity."

Glenn Perachio, EMEA director at Autonomy ZANTAZ, comments: "UHB is perfect example of an organisation that was looking for an archiving solution to meet its storage optimisation requirements but has also seen
benefits in terms of corporate governance and compliance. Like in many industries, it's not difficult to imagine that stringent regulations already in force in the US health industry, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) will soon be mirrored in the UK, forcing UK organisations to get their electronic data stores in order quickly."

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