Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

StorageTek KEEPS HEALTH CARE DATA HEALTHY WITH STORAGE SOLUTIONS

There is no need to call the doctor when StorageTek is in the house. With hundreds of health care customer installations worldwide and an average of 20 TBs stored in StorageTek's equipment, StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp), along with its health care partners, is keeping hospital data alive and well during its lifecycle.

At RSNA, StorageTek further demonstrated its success in the health care industry, with several notable customers, including Novant Health Corp, Greenville Hospital System and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.

Novant Health Corp of Charlotte and Winston-Salem, N.C., continues to reap the benefits of StorageTek's storage solutions. At current rates, the organization is saving $2.1 million per year that would have been spent on film for image storage.

"We realized several years ago, in conjunction with new federal regulations, that storing patient imaging studies on film was no longer efficient," said Robert Dick, technical lead of imaging applications at Novant. "With the help of StorageTek and its PACS partner, we are now able to provide physicians with fast and simultaneous access to patient images while still protecting the integrity of the data. These solutions have allowed us to centralize the management and administration of our radiological imaging data and help our hospital eliminate inefficiencies and costs associated with maintaining film storage depositories."

Greenville Hospital System (GHS) in South Carolina provides world-class care through a network of five state-of-the-art campuses and several outpatient treatment and wellness centers located throughout South Carolina, and currently uses StorageTek for a variety of strategic storage needs. The hospital system began using StorageTek's BladeStore disk storage solution in 2003 to store optical images and immediately saw a significant decrease in downtime and retrieval time.

Presently, the facility uses StorageTek's 9176 disk subsystem to store patient images that are up to a year old to allow for fast retrieval and response times for active patients. Images are then migrated to an intermediate disk storage level for about two years and then are moved to deep archive. Using this tiered-storage approach, Greenville has achieved substantial ROI and has cut its batch cycle in half, specifically reducing certain jobs from 20 minutes to a single minute.

At Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., keeping costs down is always an issue. In addition, data and images must be readily accessible and kept on hand for longer periods because of new federal regulations. As a result, Wake Forest looked to information lifecycle management solutions from StorageTek to store data more cost-effectively by placing the right data on the right device at the right time. Through its tiered-storage approach, Wake Forest has increased its ability to comply with federal regulations, while also cutting costs by leveraging existing resources more effectively.

"We're finding that our health care customers are required to balance the immediacy of data access with cost effective archiving capabilities," said Gary Zasman, director of information lifecycle management solutions at StorageTek. "StorageTek's information lifecycle management solutions enable health care organizations to reduce costs while providing a scalable, efficient storage offering at various levels throughout the lifespan of the data. In conjunction with our best-in-class partners and more than 30 years experience dedicated to meeting storage needs, StorageTek continues to be a viable partner for health care organizations looking to maximize the value of their data."

Health care solutions from StorageTek are designed to meet the specific needs of the health care industry and the demanding nature of health care information retrieval. This includes data management needs associated with radiology, pathology, cardiology, and various aspects of health care administration. Archiving solutions for PACS (Picture Archive Communication Systems) are sold in association with key PACS partners including Siemens Medical Solutions, Philips Medical Systems, Agfa Health care, Kodak Health Imaging, and Rorke Data.