Penn State Hershey Opens Research Center

HERSHEY, Pa. – Officials from Penn State Hershey held a groundbreaking on Jan. 14 for a new $54 million data center on the Medical Center and College of Medicine campus.

Construction of the 46,000-square-foot University Technology Center will help usher in valuable data that the university can use to enhance patient care. At the new technology center, the university aims to perform disease modeling and predictors for disease by processing and analyzing clinical information.

The new center will provide centralized space and better security for patient research and educational data for the Medical Center and College of Medicine, as well as computers and main frames for analyzing the information.
“Building this new data center is every bit as crucial for improving the health outcomes of people in central Pennsylvania as building a new hospital or institute,” said Dr. A. Craig Hillemeier, chief executive officer, Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Penn State’s senior vice president for health affairs and dean, in a statement. “Two of the biggest factors in modern health care are personalized medicine and population health, and the common denominator with both is the ability to gather and analyze large volumes of rich health data.”
Researchers at Penn State Hershey Institute for Personalized Medicine hope the data center will help them with their work. The institute helps to manage a bio-repository of patient samples such as blood and saliva from Penn State Hershey clinics and other providers. It then uses genomic resources with high-end tools for genetic testing and analysis of these patient samples and finally, the samples are prepared for geno-sequencing. The center will enhance these efforts to make personalized medicine a reality for patients and their providers by making it possible to analyze in minutes or hours what would take scientists and doctors days, weeks or months.
The center also will allow doctors and others to use clinical data to identify populations of patients at risk for specific diseases, such as diabetes or stroke, to help those patients better manage their health issues and, in cases, reduce bad health outcomes. This is known as a population health approach, which is important for health systems so they may be reimbursed more for the quality of the care they provide and for their ability to reduce costs through prevention and disease management.
In addition, the data center will serve a crucial role in the university’s disaster recovery plan as the back-up location for Penn State’s primary data center. Businesses looking to set up enterprise-class servers (Servidor Dedicado) and Tier 3 data centers in order to meet their technological needs may want to look at the services from a company like M247.
“As Penn State Hershey continues to expand technology to provide the best education, research, patient care and community service possible, the demands for data center capacity, collaboration and security have increased significantly,” said Rodney Dykehouse, chief information officer, Penn State Hershey, in a statement. “This data center puts Penn State on par with the most cutting-edge health care organizations in the nation in terms of redundancies that ensure disaster recovery capabilities, energy efficiency and the ability to support future growth and data needs.”
The center will feature various energy-saving components. Measures incorporated into the center’s design are expected to result in using at least 60 percent less power for critical systems than typical data centers. The data center is tracking LEED certification. The center will be constructed to a Tier III resiliency for critical infrastructure in order to maintain a high level of operational reliability and protection of data systems.
The one-story data center will help with collaboration among approximately 100 researchers and health information technology professionals. The data center is expected to open in April 2016.