Image & Information Storage
With disaster recovery plans fresh on the minds of many healthcare providers as well as federal compliance regulations for recordkeeping, vendors are offering cost-effective storage solutions that are flexible enough in price and function to appeal to a wide range of customers. Storage vendors also are featuring easy access to patient records since that has been associated with better, more collaborative patient care.
Acuo Technologies (booth #7707) makes its HIMSS debut this year showcasing its DICOM image management, archiving and data migration solutions. The architecture scales from imaging centers through enterprise healthcare organizations in a fully distributed DICOM Storage Grid. The product suite includes an Archive/Image Manager, PACS Migration software, content-aware DICOM Router, Reconciliation Gateway, and RIS/PACS Synchronization.
BRIT Systems (booth #4100) is launching Roentgen Burner, a DICOM-compliant, automated solution for producing custom-labeled CDs and/or DVDs that contain medical images and BRIT's image viewing software. The solution combines BRIT's production server with one of Rimage's CD and/or DVD production systems. The Roentgen Burner accepts studies from any DICOM device - modalities, workstations, servers - via DICOM Store and facilitates creation of the media (CD-R or DVD-R). BRIT's image viewer, Radiology Workbench for Windows, is burned to the media along with all selected images. Data is verified by the system while a specific and detailed order file containing unique information about the user, patient, specific modality and images is produced. For sites already using BRIT's archive system, BRIT Roentgen Files, users with proper privileges can request a CD and/or DVD without the loading the studies into a workstation. From the workstation, multiple studies or subsets of exam images can be included. All annotations and key object notes are included with saved and burned images. Users can select from several Rimage CD and/or DVD production systems depending on their facilities needs. These include Protégé II, Amigo II, Autostar II and the newly released Endeaver, designed specifically for lower-volume environments. The Rimage 1500 and 4500 desktop models and the 2000i are also available.
ClearCube (booth #5101) is showcasing its architecture which is a unique union of hardware and software that delivers full Intel-based PC functionality to the user's desk from a centralized, rack-mounted environment. The web-based software manages the entire PC Blade deployment from anywhere in the world. This integrated solution delivers dramatic increases in availability, security and manageability while significantly lowering operating costs.
As part of its eHealthcare Architecture, Dell Inc. (booth #3418) is showcasing its high-performance enterprise solutions that allow healthcare organizations to efficiently store, manage, and secure critical patient health records and administrative data. That includes Dell PowerEdge servers and storage that grow with businesses' needs, and consolidation services to increase utilization of hardware purchases; data center and environmental assessments that help organizations optimize standards-based server and storage technologies; and Dell OpenManage Systems Management tools for deployment, monitoring, and automated hardware change management.
EMC Corp. (booth #3535) is highlighting three storage platforms at HIMSS. The EMC centera content addressed storage (CAS) system has been widely adopted by healthcare organizations of all sizes for integrating clinical EHR and PACS applications, email archiving, and information protection. The EMC CLARiiON family of networked storage systems includes the CLARiiON AX100i, CLARiiON CX300i and CLARiiON CX500i models. These low-cost storage area network (SAN) systems help healthcare providers to reduce storage costs, consolidate IT infrastructures and deploy an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy regardless of the size or type of environment. With the iSCSI systems, EMC is delivering a broad set of fibre channel and native iSCSI storage networking solutions, flexible enough in functionality and price to meet the needs of the world's largest healthcare organizations down to small and medium-sized hospitals. The EMC Symmetrix DMX Series can become integral elements of a comprehensive information lifecycle management strategy for healthcare organizations. Information lifecycle management maps the right service level to the right application at the right cost at the right time.
IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences (booth #2837) is showcasing its Grid Medical Archive Solution Entry Edition (GMAS EE), a bundled solution that gives clients a simple, fast, resilient and open framework to begin building a platform for delivering truly collaborative medicine. The grid is delivered with pre-configured nodes, in single-priced bundles of integrated hardware, software and services, needing minimal onsite integration. It utilizes Bycast StorageGRID Software and integrates IBM DS4100 TotalStorage, LTO and eServer xSeries servers, helping hospitals and imaging centers establish an enterprise-wide storage system to address the massive growth of radiology and cardiology imaging and other fixed content data.
InSiteOne (booth #4201) is featuring its professional data migration and an ultra-fast data retrieval feature implemented across its InDex long-term archiving line. InSiteOne's InDex is designed to optimize the storage and archiving of medical images for healthcare facilities transitioning to filmless digital imaging. The InDex web-enabled service is an affordable and versatile solution for short-term storage, retrieval and long-term archiving of DICOM and non-DICOM medical images including ultrasound, MRI, CT and radiotherapy.
InSiteOne also is showcasing its Rapid Retrieval Archiving, which brings an enhanced level of efficiency to its archiving product line. Its new flagship data center in Wallingford, Conn., includes state-of-the-art spinning disk storage. Spinning media, in conjunction with InSiteOne's advanced archiving software, assures the fastest archived data access available today, the company says.
Kodak's Health Group (booth #2313) is showcasing its CARESTREAM solutions which help healthcare IT staffs more efficiently manage information stored in a variety of systems across an enterprise, region or country. These scalable solutions help reduce expenses by providing intelligent, automated management tools and by equipping facilities with centralized management of decentralized storage systems. Kodak is showing how the open workflow of its Carestream Information Management Solutions and Carestream Radiology Solutions provide optimized image and information management across an enterprise, while simultaneously lowering total cost of ownership.
MEDITECH (booth #5033) is featuring its new scanning and archiving product at HIMSS, designed to enable healthcare organizations to move toward a paperless environment by storing all healthcare information on-line. This application provides customers with an organization-wide solution to their document scanning and imaging needs, enabling staff members to quickly scan documents into their system, review the quality of images, associate documents with patient records, and incorporate the resulting digital documents directly into users' workflow.
Network Appliance (booth #2652 is showcasing its newest disk-based solution - FAS3020. The FAS3000 series (FAS3020 or FAS3050) delivers up to twice the performance of competing products in its class and supports more users per system for greater storage consolidation capability, the company says. As part of the unified NetApp architecture, these systems support medical images in FC SAN, IP SAN, and multiple network configurations, while offering scalability to higher performance systems with seamless, painless upgrades without requiring a "forklift" data migration needed.
Additionally, the FAS3000 systems fully extend the value of the FlexVol capabilities built into Data ONTAP 7G by increasing disk performance even for small data volumes. FlexVol technology can reduce storage management costs and increase radiologists' storage utilization by up to 50 percent. Combined with the new SATA storage option, primary storage costs can be reduced by more than half, NetApp says.
TeraMedica (booth #1601) is announcing the addition of All Clinical Object support to Evercore Clinical Information Manager. All Clinical Object support enables large healthcare systems with immense clinical medical imaging and associated large-scale data sets to efficiently maintain the continuum of clinical objects in a patient-centric format. Evercore Clinical Information Manager now extends SmartStore Clinical Policy Intelligence as the lifecycle information manager to classify and consolidate across the entire patient data set.
The Evercore suite now extends a facility's medical imaging repository to include non-DICOM, visible light, ECG, video, WAV files, and reports. Data mining options enable healthcare providers to quickly create a patient's profile using a broad array of data.