Across France 37 privately owned medical facilities are utilizing Hosted Information Management (HIM), one of a number of eHealth Managed Services from Carestream Health designed to archive, share and distribute medical data more cost effectively and efficiently. Current contracts with these facilities will result in annual storage of approximately 1 million imaging studies and range from individual imaging centers such as Centre Duroc in Paris to GCN St. Vincent with 8 imaging centers and clinics around Rennes in the Ouest Region of France.

The HIM service from Carestream Health is aimed at hospitals and imaging centers choosing to manage the exponential growth of patient data by outsourcing for disaster recovery or multi-site virtual archiving and workflow. These innovative services are based on a "pay as you go" principle, with a simple business model consistent with those operated within many hospitals across Europe.

In France, as in many other European countries, initial and ongoing costs of infrastructure are the greatest barriers to healthcare IT adoption. These challenges have led to introduction of the "Avenant 24" initiative, which offers a financial incentive to private facilities in France implementing a digital archiving solution for radiology images. Several of the sites in France now connected to HIM from Carestream Health selected the service as a direct result of this initiative.

"In Mammography, comparison with prior exams is essential to correctly interpret the evolution of anomalies," said Dr Jean-Yves Seror, Senologist at the Centre Duroc in Paris. "We are not IT specialists and were immediately interested in the HIM concept proposed by Carestream Health. The service meets our needs for efficient archiving of images, fast retrieval and access to priors and removes all the long-term financial and technical implications linked to maintaining an effective, dependable archiving system."

Carestream Health's remote archive architecture involves installation of a Data Access Point, which provides the interface between the site and the data center and interaction with local systems through standard protocols and the web server. The service is based on a GRID infrastructure that supports both local and remote storage and allows on-site storage for quick access to data to be combined with off-site storage at a data center for protection, disaster recovery, data exchange and access.

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