HIMSS 08 | Data Storage: Always safe, always accessible

 
 ScImage’s PicomOnline
Disaster recovery and HIPAA compliancy are priorities in the data storage realm, with vendors offering a plethora of solutions. In particular, several companies, such as Neurostar and ScImage, are promoting the advantages of offsite backup and archiving, to satisfy HIPAA requirements for business continuity. The companies are evolving with innovative document management solutions as the digitization of patient, employee and financial records, as well as integrating into electronic medical records or other retrieval system.


Acuo Technologies (Booth 8075) is showing version 6.0 of its DICOM Services Grid, a distributed framework for managing increasing medical imaging volume. By releasing the archive function from PACS, DICOM Services Grid allows healthcare institutions to own digital imaging data without future data migration setbacks, the company says.

The latest release features full XDS-I Source and XDS-I Consumer functionality, along with high-performance API integrations to the advanced medical imaging infrastructures from Cisco, EMC, and IBM, which offer a robust choice of infrastructure technologies to manage the information lifecycle of medical imaging and related clinical content.

The company also is launching a data migration program that will accompany next-generation PACS deployment, as well as provide a framework, in DICOM data migration.


Carestream Health (Booth 4248) is highlighting its Kodak Carestream information management solutions (IMS) platform that manages archived radiology images, displays DICOM and non-DICOM data and consolidates fixed content information, such as scanned patient documents, reports, audio clips, email and video files into a central data repository.

The capabilities are available on enterprise-wide and regional levels and the solutions can be integrated with a customer’s existing storage area network or network-attached storage systems.


Network Appliance (Booth 2227) is demonstrating the capabilities of its NearStore virtual tape library (VTL) solution, a disk-to-disk backup appliance widely adopted by healthcare organizations that appears as a tape library to a backup software application to provide superior speed and reliability of disk technologies.

NearStore VTL reduces management costs and improves backup and recovery performance while leveraging existing IT investments and processes, the company says. The system can be used to back up any open system storage environment and is certified for use with enterprise backup software.


Neurostar Solutions (Booth 4108) is debuting its myPIR, a service allowing patients to share personal imaging records with the attending physicians and specialists online. The service also provides long-term storage and private internet access to patient records.

The company also is showcasing version 7 of its Virtual Radiology Network (VRN)—a service-oriented architecture for online management of clinical images. VRN 7 features cross-enterprise data access—a grid-like architecture that makes patient records available independent of the location of the data or the user. The new VRN 7 features a PACS Insurance program. Designed for organizations that have already installed PACS, the program offers disaster recovery and business continuity via off-site data and operations backup.


ScImage (Booth 6971) is displaying its PicomOnline, which is a hosted, datacenter service providing off-site PACS, disaster recovery, long-term archiving and telemedicine services for diagnostic imaging services. The system can be used standalone as a virtual PACS solution or in conjunction with onsite PACS solutions such as PicomEnterprise. PicomOnline also provides a way to satisfy HIPAA requirements by providing offsite storage for backup and business continuity purposes.

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