Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS PRESCRIBE EMC CENTERA FOR ARCHIVES

Resolving the challenges that traditionally prevented healthcare institutions from bringing digitized medical records and images online, EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) has been driving industry change since its introduction in April of this year. Federal regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), are requiring healthcare providers to store clinical data longer and provide faster, more reliable retrieval. Concurrently, online applications, such as picture archiving communications systems (PACS) and electronic patient records (EPR), are driving an explosion of digital fixed content information.

EMC Centera manages the long-term archiving requirements for PACS, while enabling hospitals and healthcare professionals to protect critical patient information supporting the HIPAA standards. Its innovative authenticity features have prompted analysts to refer to it as the first disk-based WORM (write once, read many) storage medium, and its self-healing capabilities provide a new level of assured content integrity for all healthcare organizations. Information protection, coupled with online retrieval and simplified management, translate into higher staff productivity, lower operational costs and, ultimately, improved quality of patient care. Examples of leading healthcare organizations utilizing Centera include:

Children's Hospital Boston, the nation's #1 pediatric hospital, has selected EMC Centera to serve as the back up and long-term repository for its FUJIFILM Synapse PACS-based radiology images and electronic medical records. The hospital will also implement EMC CLARiiON networked storage to provide short-term storage of PACS images.

Dr. Ted Treves, Children's Hospital's Vice Chairman for Information Technology, Radiology Department and Chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine, said, "Centera will resolve a major workflow issue by centralizing our historical medical images in an online repository. We have hundreds of thousands of films and each must be indexed and located by hand. It can take a day to order a patient's films from an off-site facility and even more time to identify the correct image from a stack of films. With Centera, we will be able to retrieve images in seconds, which will greatly enhance our radiologists' decision-making regarding a patient's future treatment."

John Speziale, Children's Hospital's Director of IT, Radiology Department, said, "Centera's self-healing architecture, automated management and online expandability will allow our medical staff to provide more efficient and focused patient care. Because storage management will be simplified, we will achieve our goal of online access to our patients' history for 25 years after their last visit to our hospital and be well positioned to meet federal mandates regarding digitization of medical records."

Exeter Health Resources, a comprehensive New Hampshire-based healthcare provider, has selected EMC Centera as the permanent online repository for its Agfa IMPAX PACS images and patient records for Exeter Hospital.

Chief Information Officer of Exeter Health Resources, David Briden, said, "The hospital is excited about deploying EMC Centera content addressed storage into the organization. We chose Centera because it didn't have the scalability limitations of optical solutions, or the slow retrieval times of offline tape archives. The Agfa IMPAX PACS offering, integrated with EMC Centera, represents a strong value proposition. We see this new capability as a good match to our requirements for our PACS system."

Quantum Diagnostic Imaging, a Dallas-based provider of diagnostic imaging services, will use Centera in conjunction with its new Merge eFilm PACSbuilder solution to dramatically speed access to radiological images and consequently improve productivity of clinicians involved in viewing and interpreting these images.

"There is potential for our stored image capacity to increase ten-fold over the next two years as a result of industry-wide compliance with HIPAA regulations and rapid adoption of PACS and other digital solutions," said Bill Radtke, Quantum Diagnostic Imaging's Director of Technology. "The non-disruptive expandability of EMC's Centera is key to our success in managing this growth. We can simply keep plugging in new Centera systems without any reconfiguration issues because the Centera software automatically recognizes and utilizes new capacity."

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing automated networked storage solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to better and more cost-effectively manage, protect and share their information. More information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.

Contact: AJ Ragosta of EMC Corporation, 508-293-6884, ragosta--aj@emc.com.