Iron Mountain Works With HP To Help The Healthcare Industry Store And Protect Growing Volumes Of Medical Images
Iron Mountain Incorporated , a provider of information protection and storage services, announced it is collaborating with HP to offer mid-sized hospitals and imaging centers a new service for protecting and storing their rising volume of diagnostic images.
Iron Mountain's new Digital Record Center for Medical Images is a disaster recovery and long-term archiving service that is powered by the HP Medical Archive solution (MAS) and leverages Iron Mountain's Storage-as-a- Service expertise. The result is a solution for healthcare providers, who must deliver on-demand access to diagnostic images, comply with federal laws for handling patient data and reduce long-term storage costs.
As a managed service, the Digital Record Center for Medical Images provides secure, off-site, back-up protection without requiring hospitals and imaging centers to set aside storage systems, data center space, staff and capital investments. This helps medical institutions to reduce their storage costs and allows them to redirect resources to clinical operations.
"We are applying the same Storage-as-a-Service formula for medical imaging that we've successfully applied to other industries," said Ken Rubin, senior vice president of strategic alliances for Iron Mountain. "We can offer hospitals and imaging centers better disaster recovery capability and lower their storage costs versus in-house systems."
Powering Iron Mountain's latest storage service is HP MAS, an industry- specific solution for long-term archival storage of medical fixed content, consisting of factory-integrated HP disk storage and servers, as well as indexing and policy management software. HP recently made significant enhancements to HP MAS (3.0) to help healthcare providers improve patient care; facilitate regulatory compliance; increase storage flexibility; lower storage costs; and improve operational efficiencies. HP MAS is currently installed at more than 175 healthcare institutions in 15 countries.
"Working with Iron Mountain, we are able to extend the HP Medical Archive solution to an even greater number of healthcare providers," said Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager, Information Management, Software, HP. "This is another key step to strengthen our commitment in providing solutions tailored for organizations of all sizes within the healthcare industry."
Iron Mountain and HP will jointly market and sell two service offerings within the Digital Record Center for Medical Images. The Disaster Recovery Service provides healthcare organizations with a secure, off-site copy of imaging studies and allows timely data recovery in the event of a disaster at the customer site. The Disaster Recovery and Long-term Archiving Service enables customers to eliminate on-site storage and associated costs by providing two protected and replicated copies in Iron Mountain's secure underground data bunkers in Western Pennsylvania and Missouri. With both choices, customers pay as they store, maximizing cost effectiveness by eliminating inefficiencies associated with data center space and management overhead.
"The Digital Record Center for Medical Images is a simple solution that fulfills all of our medical imaging needs for both archival storage and disaster recovery," said Thuan Nguyen, IT director, Seattle Radiologists. "Now we can access our images as if they were on-site, but without the cost and responsibility of maintaining a secure and scalable storage system."
Diagnostic imaging is on the rise. One recent estimate from National Imaging Associates predicts imaging procedures in the United States will increase in 2008 to 600 million. This growth, coupled with the expanding file size of images, challenges hospitals and imaging centers to control storage costs and comply with disaster recovery and data storage guidelines like those required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
"The medical imaging marketplace is rapidly evolving," said Chris Connor, senior research analyst at Health Industry Insights, an IDC company. "Historically, only medical institutions with large capital budgets had the resources to maintain a scalable, digital-image archive. But as the use of diagnostic imaging expands and images exceed in-house storage capacities, institutions of all sizes need the same capabilities to archive and safeguard their images."
The Digital Record Center for Medical Images complements Iron Mountain's current portfolio of health information solutions. Healthcare providers trust Iron Mountain to solve their unique and evolving challenges of simultaneously managing both physical and digital records, while ensuring timely access to patient records and complying with the ever-growing patient privacy regulations. As healthcare providers transition to electronic medical records, only Iron Mountain can securely manage their analog films, protect and store their diagnostic images with the Digital Record Center for Medical Images, and bridge the physical and digital worlds with X-ray on Demand, a film conversion service.
About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The Company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions, along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain is a trusted partner to more than 100,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit the Company's Web site at www.ironmountain.com.
SOURCE: Iron Mountain Incorporated