“We have healthcare data going back to the 1990s that we’re required to keep. Our backups were taking a full weekend. We needed a solution that would not only help us affordably archive all our old data at a separate location but also ensure that the data is easily accessible any time a doctor or somebody has to pull a file, from whatever year. We found what we needed with Wasabi and Komprise.”
— Kevin Rhode, Chief Information Officer, District Medical Group

Overview

District Medical Group (DMG) is a non-profit, integrated medical group consisting of more than 650 doctors and credentialed providers dedicated to improving the health and well-being of individuals in Arizona. Like most organizations in the healthcare industry, the amount of data that DMG generates and is required to retain is growing exponentially. DMG is bound by retention periods for records that fall under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the state-mandated medical records retention period of seven years. On top of that, Arizona law requires DMG to keep a minor child’s records until the child turns 21. This requirement creates a mountain of archive data since DMG runs Children’s Rehabilitative Services, the largest multi-specialty interdisciplinary clinic in the state, serving special needs children.

“We have to keep data for regulatory and standard record-keeping purposes, but a lot of the data isn’t actively managed or used,” said Kevin Rhode, Chief Information Officer at DMG. “We shouldn’t have to back up this same stale data over and over and over again.” To that end, Rhode challenged his team to find an affordable archiving solution that would help free up primary storage capacity and be easy to access and manage. “We wanted something that wasn’t going to require one of us to jump on a system and try to reconstitute an entire network drive from 20 years ago,” he said.

Cost and functionality top the decision-making criteria

Affordability and functionality factored high in DMG’s decision to go with Wasabi’s Reserved Capacity Service (RCS) for active archiving, along with intelligent data management from Komprise, a Wasabi Technology Alliance Partner. DMG worked with Komprise to develop an archiving system that breaks out data into individual buckets by year, allowing DMG to not only clear up on-prem storage capacity but also control and more easily analyze its data going forward. Plus, Wasabi is HIPAA-compliant, and users can access archived files the same way they access local files.
“Wasabi was far and away much, much less expensive than AWS and Azure,” said Rhode, “and the functionality that we could get with the partnership between Komprise and Wasabi—the way we could configure, organize, and store our data—felt much more comfortable than with the other platforms.” Since deploying the Komprise-Wasabi solution, DMG’s backups have shrunk significantly, yet users can instantly access that archived data. “Essentially, all we have to back up is a 0-KB placeholder link that points to the file stored with Wasabi,” said Rhode.

Simple to set up in-house, easy for doctors to access

Rhode also considered the resources needed to set up an archiving solution. “We looked at the amount of work we’d have to do and whether we’d need external resources,” Rhode said. “To set up archiving with AWS or Azure, we’d have to pull in additional resources. With Wasabi, we were able to do everything in-house.”
“Setup was a breeze,” said Colby Burdick, systems administrator at DMG. “I didn’t have to call Wasabi’s support once while setting it up.”
Doctors and clinicians must have access to the data that helps them make the best decisions for their patients. And they need to get that data quickly. “I have no control over what the doctors decide they need or when they need it. This was a worry tickling the back of my brain during the decision-making process. I would need all the files from the 1990s on,” recalled Rhode. “Wasabi and Komprise just made it easy and affordable for us to be able to provide the quick and simple access that our doctors and staff require.”

Predictable pricing and cost transparency is icing on the cake

Because Wasabi doesn’t have complicated pricing tiers or charge for egress or API requests, DMG can enjoy price predictability on a monthly basis, along with cost transparency for budget forecasting. “We can predict out for budgeting based on the numbers we get from our archive solution year over year,” Rhode said, “so we can watch and predict what our increases are going to be. It’s a much more stable environment.” With Komprise, DMG can gain insights into data usage across its storage environment and perform custom ROI reports and other analytics.

On the horizon: Spreading the benefits of Wasabi hot cloud storage

So far, DMG has moved about 4.5 million files into their active archive using the Komprise-Wasabi solution. In the first three years, Rhode estimates that DMG will save a little over $45,000 annually in storage costs. In the meantime, Rhode and his team are exploring implementing similar active archiving for other data-laden DMG departments with retention requirements, like accounting and human resources.