02 Apr CIO Leadership: Part 3 – Phil Fasano Kaiser CIO on data center redundancy
Editor’s Note: In the last of a three part exclusive interview with Philip Fasano, Senior Vice President and CIO for Kaiser Health Plan, and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Fasano discusses his strategy for outsourcing to IBM a $500 million data center operations management project. Read part one at here and part two here.
WTN News: In regards to your recent $500 million data center outsourcings agreement with IBM Healthcare what are your plans for a mirrored site or a redundant data center?
Phil Fasano: IBM Healthcare has facilities around the world. Our relationship is strictly centered on our current facilities, we did not out source our data centers to themselves, we own the facilities, we own all of the equipment in them so we have asked them to bring in a services relationship and we have asked them to bring in their resources to partner with ours in those sites.
WTN News: Do you currently run, or do you plan a redundant center?
Fasano: We have about a half a dozen data centers, some of them are quite large, multiple hundreds of thousands of feet, so we have the ability within this organization to have redundancies from center to center within our own operations.
WTN News: Kaiser has a detailed vision for “real-time healthcare delivery,” how are you taking this all this data that’s being archived whether its PAC’s or clinical information and looking at matching it to with patient consent to a DNA or genomics database that eventually could be used to deliver personalized medicine? There are thousands of terabytes data and how can take that information and use analytics to mine the data for insights? What is the next step?
Fasano: Kasier has an industry-leading department of research, which has developed a phenomenal following in the industry and they are doing DNA testing in studies and starting to develop a basis of data analysis, with permission. Most of that data needs to be identified so that we are able to do blind studies in over time with it. The team has specific agenda relative to that kind of analysis and research, which we are pursuing as an organization. We believe there is a awful lot of potential in this area and as an organization and ultimately my core IT organization, we will be in a position to support that type of an activity and do it in a way that allows us to both manage the patient confidentiality issues that we hold very highly and at the same time benefit from the learning’s and potential of that kind of information.