In terms of health care IT, what does the next five years look like? The IT team at Harvard Medical School — Partners HealthCare Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG) has focused its efforts on building a viable IT foundation with the right hardware and innovative software. The team also hopes to ensure that IT is not a constraining factor in realizing the benefits of next-generation sequencing technologies. Read this white paper to learn how HPCGG is implementing a cost-effective storage system that can integrate with its existing cluster environment for exponentially faster data access.
Extending the IT foundation for personalized medicineHarvard Medical School - Partners HealthCare Center for Genetics and Genomics wanted its storage to keep pace with data volumes from new sequencing technologies. In terms of health care IT, what does the next five years In partnership with HP, HPCGG deployed a large look like? It's an open-ended question, but the IT team multi-cluster compute facility to support researchers at Harvard Medical School - Partners HealthCare throughout Partners HealthCare, which includes Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG) has a Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham quick and targeted response. To support its vision of and Women's Hospital. In addition to processing personalized medicine, where clinicians are able to capabilities, HPCGG implemented a shared storage make treatment and medication decisions based on approach for raw instrument data, results files and a patient's genetic profile, IT has and will continue to database objects for increased collaboration across play a huge role. institutions. In the past five years, HPCGG focused its efforts on Leveraging that shared infrastructure, HPCGG and building a viable IT foundation with the right hardware HP collaborated in the creation of the Gateway for and innovative software. "Making personalized Integrated Genomics-Proteomics Applications and medicine really work requires a vast amount of IT Data (GIGPAD). The software environment integrates infrastructure," says Sandy Aronson (pictured on disparate laboratory information management systems right, next page), Executive Director of Information (LIMS), provides a portal to submit and access Technology, HPCGG. "We've been building that biological samples, and enables efficient management foundation incrementally so we are in a strategic of analytical workflows and data repositories. position to address the challenges stemming from next generation sequencing technologies."
Technology for better business outcomes"We work closely with HP to constantly
develop, enhance and deploy the IT solutions
that enable us to keep pace with the field."
John Glaser, CIO
Partners HealthCare
By keeping the biomedical and life science data in one place, users can work on it almost immediately instead of waiting a day for the migration.
"Everything we do is to benefit the patient," says Trung "The rate of change in the genomics field is Do, Executive Director Business Development, Partners accelerating with new instruments initially introduced HealthCare. "While the deeper integration of genetics for research purposes transitioning into clinical use," and genomics into clinical practice is a huge advance says John Glaser (pictured on left, previous page), for patient care and diagnostics, we also recognized CIO, Partners HealthCare. "We are seeing testing the pressure it was exerting on our systems. There volumes on these new instruments ramp very rapidly. was a new set of requirements in how we practice We work closely with HP to constantly develop, medicine and run our business, and we had to ensure enhance and deploy the IT solutions that enable us to that IT remained an enabler of both research and keep pace with the field." patient care." With the new technologies, it can take approximately IT as an enabler one month to sequence a human genome in a For organizations like HPCGG, there is an ongoing research context, which is about 10x faster than what concern that IT must keep pace with the biology, was available previously. The sequencing process especially in terms of storage capabilities. As the generates very large data volumes, and the complexity costs of sequencing technologies continue to fall and associated with image analysis, quality scoring, the volumes of data from those technologies continue base-calling and information analysis requires a high to rise, that concern becomes a reality that IT must performance computational environment. grapple with daily. The focus is on ensuring that IT is not a constraining factor in realizing the benefits of Using the previous generation of sequencing next generation sequencing technologies. technologies, organizations could reasonably predict data growth; estimates hovered around a doubling of data every 18 months. But the new technologies have changed all of that.
3"Four years ago, we were able to have a fairly To address its storage-rela... [download for more]
