Medical Imaging
The health care industry is experiencing explosive storage growth, driven by new applications as well as the impact of ever increasing regulation. Hundreds or thousands of terabytes of storage capacity is now quite commonly in use in many hospitals, research centers, medical schools, medical centers and clinics, and other health care facilities as the need for capacity continues to grow exponentially.
Typical new health care applications that can improve efficiency and cut costs include the Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS) solution set, and multi-slice Computed Tomography (CT) scans. PACS digitally store cardiology and radiology tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results, and other large files. Multi-slice CTs allow faster brain scans, and can focus on thinner slices of tissue than previous CTs. However, both of these promising new applications require significant storage capacity, and high performance.
In addition to new technological requirements, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which in part requires organizations to keep patient records safe, secure and available for decades, is legislation that further increases the need for digital storage. Patient health and personal data must be also adequately protected so that patient privacy preserved in accordance with the Act and other regulation.
The result is that it is more crucial than ever before that healthcare professionals have rapid, dependable access to digital diagnostics data. At the same time, health organizations must maintain security and privacy standards for patient records, and do so effectively without adding large support staffs and increasing budgets dramatically.
From a storage perspective, this translates to:
- The storage architecture has to scale, while satisfying individual performance and capacity requirements independently
- Organizations must maintain existing investment while expanding their capacity. A modular approach with choices of different levels of performance and capacity, while providing investment protection
- IT must have easy, comprehensive management of vast amounts of data, while staying within limited IT budgets. A scalable and high performance system is required for managing hundreds of terabytes of data with limited resources while supporting a common knowledge base
- Data protection of digital records and images becomes ever more critical, with integration of backup software applications from a variety of vendors, while providing disaster recovery capability through replication
- The ability to access medical information easily with e-discovery capability is a growing need to be addressed by IT in the storage solutions that they implement
While all of this sounds extremely challenging, there is an answer. The Intransa architecture used in our StorStac system leverages our proven, IP-based infrastructure solutions to deliver independent scalability and capacity growth with high availability, yet affordably with true ease-of-use built in. Few other solutions allow users to start with just a few terabytes (TBs) of storage, suitable for a handful of medical imaging devices as primary storage, through to 1,500TB. And Intransa systems accomplish this without sending anything to the landfill, since all components can be used in larger and larger configurations.
With our integrated StorStac GUI management system, Intransa solutions provide seamless, easy-to-use management that scales as your needs grow, without the cost and complexity of legacy solutions. And our StorAlliance technology partners deliver best-in-class solutions as part of a comprehensive answer to health care industry needs, integrated into the Intransa solution.