CHAPTER 5 Components of an HCM System 49
Filing plans are enormously important, but please do not exaggerate
by detailing the filing plan too much. If it is too detailed, the effort
to maintain it conscientiously and navigate within the plan increases.
The users will reward you for this attention to detail by not using it.
Unsurprisingly, the effort for entering data increases with each additional
register, but the benefit decreases because there are only a few
or no documents per register.
Safely Stowed: The Data Storage
An HCM system always has the component »data storage«. After all, the data
received, including metadata, must be stored and made available for the various
applications. If archiving is one of the intended applications of an HCM system,
this data memory can also contain a long-term archiving storage. It is also possible
to integrate an external storage for long-term archiving (see »archive management
« component later in this chapter).
The data storage of an HCM system must support all possible scenarios
of the healthcare facility. This means that both expensive storage for
fast response times and storage for particularly reliable data storage,
which usually have longer response times, should be integrated. For
this reason, heterogeneous storage solutions must be supported, such
as RAID, SAN, NAS, HSM or cloud storage.
The management of storage is of particular importance. The logical organization
of stored data should be independent of the underlying physical storage
infrastructure.
To ensure multitenancy and protection against seizure, it must
also be possible to store data specifically for a tenant on specific hardware.
It is crucial that the HCM system stores the different data formats on the appropriate
storage solution upon receipt according to their use cases. Typically, however, the
demand changes over time; for example, because the demand for higher response
times decreases with the age of data. This redistribution of data to the appropriate
storage infrastructure must be performed automatically and in a rule-based way
in the background by the HCM system. The criteria for the redistribution can be
varied; accordingly, a large and flexible rule set is necessary.
Last but not least, an HCM system must facilitate maintenance of the storage
infrastructure.
This includes, for example, emptying old hardware before it is
removed
during operation, integrating new hardware and checking the integrity
of the data inventory.