Hospital finds outsourced data archive
simple, cost-effective:
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The adoption of digital technologies and
IT in healthcare, and the consequent growth in the volume
of patient data, presents hospitals with significant challenges
in terms of data storage and obsolescence management. Dutch
regulations require medical data to be available for 10
to 30 years. This prompted the Maasstad Hospital in Rotterdam
to evaluate and identify the costs and risks associated
with long-term digital data management as part of plans
to move its site in September 2010.
The primary requirement of the six-month evaluation was
to meet the hospital’s goal of doubling activity without
inducing system failure. The total cost of long-term data
management was also calculated, with all tasks required
to maintain minimum service levels for users taken into
account. These tasks included maintenance, monitoring, obsolescence
management, reinvestment, and migration. Additional constraints
included compliance with Dutch regulations on healthcare
data security, privacy, and retention, as well as vendor
neutrality, which was necessary to allow seamless connectivity
with a cardiology and a radiology PACS.
This process led to an innovative strategy being adopted:
to outsource all IT production systems to a remote data
center and to use a hosted archive service (to be provided
by Carestream Health).
Over 70 TB of legacy data are being migrated to the vendor-neutral
archive service, including radiology, cardiology, and echocardiology
examinations, digitized patient records, and a variety of
back-office data, such as e-mail. All new data, including
180,000 new radiology studies, are now encrypted and sent
to the remote data center too.
A data access point has been installed to connect the local
RIS/PACS to the remote data center via a virtual private
network (VPN). New studies arriving in the PACS are encrypted
and forwarded. Data arriving at the remote archive are copied
using two different media for continuity and disaster recovery.
Prior studies can take a few seconds or a few minutes to
be delivered, depending on bandwidth to the data center
and the volume of images requested. Waiting times can be
avoided for patients scheduled on the worklist; images are
prefetched and made available to the local PACS. Partner
hospitals may also gain access to the stored images if they
are equipped with a data access point.
This type of service model has many benefits. Costs are
predictable and are incurred in real-time, rather than as
a capital expense. The price for outsourcing archive services
can be established by either volume of data (GB or TB) or
number of studies. The per-study price commonly covers its
incorporation in the archive and its retention for an agreed
period. The hospital is also freed from the responsibility
and cost of managing hardware and systems obsolescence,
including data migration. Another key benefit is that the
archive is vendor-neutral, so replacing an aging PACS is
not an issue.
Transferring sensitive patient data to a hosted service
does not mean losing control. Service providers are usually
contracted to provide regular and detailed activity reports
on, for instance, the number of studies stored during the
previous month, and/or the total volume of data held. Proven
IT technologies and secure platforms, the storage of backup
copies of information, and the use of VPN tunnels, data
encryption, and audit trails should all ensure data security.
A hosted archive service need not be more expensive than
an onsite archive. This becomes clear when all costs are
taken into account. Economies of scale will drive costs
down as more hospitals adopt this model of outsourced archiving.
Users may choose to archive all of their clinical data in
this manner. Some European countries are using this type
of service to establish electronic patient records and build
national or regional data repositories.
In time, additional services will be launched that relate
to workflow management or viewing capabilities, transforming
PACS and RIS as we know them. Pay-as-you-go will be introduced,
allowing users to concentrate on clinical applications instead
of which technology to use. Value-added services, such as
teleradiology portals, consultation portals, and data mining
services, are also likely, helping to improve the quality
of care.
Source: www.diagnosticimaging.com
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