Hospitals can centralize and liberate medical images and clinical
data, lowering IT costs and improving access to patient information
across the organization
Visit Iron Mountain at the HIMSS 2011 Conference in booth #2712
BOSTON, Feb 21, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) --
Iron
Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), the information management
company, today announced it has added vendor neutral functionality to
its enterprise-level archive - the Digital
Record Center(R) for Medical Images - for storing, sharing and
protecting diagnostic images and other patient data. This cloud-based
archive gives healthcare organizations a central repository for
consolidating and liberating medical imaging and patient data from
departmental-level (radiology, cardiology, other modalities) storage
silos. Additionally, hospitals can improve their disaster recovery and
business continuity readiness by leveraging the cloud-based offering for
offsite, secure storage. The net impact is lower costs, enhanced image
sharing ability, better reliability and security, and ultimately
improved patient care.
In today's patient-care settings, providers view and store medical-image
data through Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS). These
systems are bulging at the seams as advances in medical imaging yield
higher-resolution, larger-file pictures and doctors rely more on imaging
to treat aging Baby Boomers and other patients. Hospitals typically rely
on or acquire multiple PACS from various vendors to manage different
types of images, and these PACS do not easily integrate with each other,
trapping patient data within silos. This limits physicians' ability to
share data about the same patient and complicates delivering on the
promise of a holistic electronic medical record. Solving this problem
requires hospital IT leaders to set up data sharing between PACS while
accommodating non PACS-based images as well - a costly and daunting
process. Moreover, as vendors replace their PACS every few years,
hospitals must undergo the complex and expensive process to migrate
their images from one system to the next.
Iron Mountain is partnering with DeJarnette Research Systems, a pioneer
in PACS data migrations and interoperability, to deliver a cloud-based
vendor neutral archive service that solves these issues. This
combination of DeJarnette's software with Iron Mountain's enterprise
archive and its highly secure data center to provide a truly neutral
solution for storing, accessing and sharing medical images and patient
data. As a cloud-based service, hospitals now have the option to deploy
this service on a "pay-per-use" basis, avoiding the large capital
expense and the management support burden typically associated with
large-scale medical image archiving solutions. Providers reduce the cost
and complexity of managing medical images currently trapped in silos
across their organizations and secure their data in an offsite storage
archive to help ensure it is available in the event an individual PACS
fails. Iron Mountain's medical image archive is compatible with other
third party Vendor Neutral Archive solutions, providing hospitals with
flexibility in choosing a VNA and a cloud storage solution.
"Hospitals are advocating for VNAs for three reasons. They can't share
images trapped in their various PACS systems. They can't afford the
costly data migrations from one PACS to the next. And they're tired of
being handcuffed to their PACS vendors without practical options for
storing, sharing and protecting patient data," said Ken Rubin, senior
vice president of healthcare services for Iron Mountain. "Iron Mountain
is ideally suited to deliver vendor neutral archiving because our
customers understand we're truly vendor neutral and they trust the
security and reliability of our cloud storage platform. And, when you
combine our VNA capabilities with our archiving and back-up cloud
services, we can provide customers with an enterprise-wide archiving and
back-up solution for not only medical images but for other primary
applications in a healthcare organization."
For more information on the Iron Mountain vendor neutral archive and
Iron Mountain Healthcare Services, visit Iron Mountain at the 2011 HIMSS
Annual Conference & Exhibition in booth 2712 or go to www.ironmountain.com/vna.
About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) provides information management
services that help organizations lower the costs, risks and
inefficiencies of managing their physical and digital data. The
company's solutions enable customers to protect and better use their
information--regardless of its format, location or lifecycle stage--so
they can optimize their business and ensure proper recovery, compliance
and discovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain manages billions of
information assets, including business records, electronic files,
medical data, emails and more for organizations around the world. Visit www.ironmountain.com
or follow the company on Twitter at www.twitter.com/IronMountain
for more information.
SOURCE: Iron Mountain Incorporated
Iron Mountain
Christian T. Potts, 617-535-8721
christian.potts@ironmountain.com
or
Weber Shandwick
Kristen Georgian, 617-520-7042
kgeorgian@webershandwick.com