From the January 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Need for cost-effective, consolidated archiving prompts CIOs/CTOs to consider cloud services
By Bruce Leidal
Health care CIOs face a daunting combination: explosive growth in patient data, the need to comply with meaningful use initiatives and budget constraints driven by sagging revenues and an unstable economy. Cloud-based archiving services promise to help health care organizations address these incompatible realities.
CIOs are eager to avoid the cost of rapidly escalating investments in existing proprietary departmental archives. We all recognize that replacing departmental storage silos with a consolidated archive is an urgent need. As it turns out, that conversion is greatly expedited by converting to managed and/or cloud-based services.
Cloud archiving allows health care systems to consolidate storage of radiology, cardiology, pathology and other types of files. CIOs can work closely with managers and administrators of multiple departments throughout the hospital to verify that a prospective archiving service supports the file types used by each department, including DICOM, JPG, MPEG, PDF, BMP, DOC, and XLS.
From a financial perspective, purchasing archiving as a pay-per-use service eliminates the need for up front capital investment in storage capacity that is usually oversized for future growth. Traditional archiving also requires ongoing costs to support upgrades, service and maintenance agreements. Yet, with a pay-per-use service in place, CIOs can accurately predict costs based on current and projected imaging/data volumes. The services provider assumes responsibility for continuously updating storage hardware and software as well as developing security processes and procedures that address current regulatory standards. The cloud also offers an affordable method for achieving business continuity and disaster recovery for all data. It’s the ideal model for an offsite data center.
Enhanced data access sharing
Hospitals, imaging centers and other health care facilities are experiencing dramatic growth in data generation and storage, driven in part by 3D modalities such as CT and MR. These imaging technologies produce more detailed diagnostic information, but they require vast storage resources: each patient study can be as large as 150 megabytes. New imaging technologies can be expected to deliver even greater amounts of data as new features and functions are added. Health care providers must also be able to quickly and easily deliver large imaging files to radiologists, physicians and specialists. And that brings up another benefit of vendor-neutral cloud services: they allow patient information and images to be easily shared with authorized users. Cloud solutions are flexible: they may be integrated into on-premise information management systems, EMR/EHR solutions, and deliver interoperability requirements that are part of achieving meaningful use. Services that support zero-footprint viewers expedite clinicians’ access to images and reports via iPads, PCs or workstations.
