HP Introduced a Medical Archiving Solution

Hewlett-Packard introduced a specialized archiving platform to help global
healthcare providers, hospitals and imaging clinics of all sizes meet
rapidly expanding retention requirements for medical images.

With the HP Medical Archive solution (MAS) 3.0, healthcare providers
can strengthen their focus on improving patient care while also
adhering to strict compliance regulations by ensuring that medical
image data is securely indexed, preserved and accessible.

Healthcare organizations are challenged with ensuring that patient
safety remains their No. 1 priority in the face of increasing costs,
labor shortages and reduced reimbursements for procedures. At the same
time, the medical imaging storage market is doubling every 24 months
due to growing volumes of diagnostic images, medical documents and lab
reports.

Asante Health System, a major healthcare provider in southern Oregon
and northern California, selected HP MAS to help improve patient care
by providing greater access to critical patient information.

“Key factors that drove our decision to move forward with HP were
the ability to ‘grow as you go,’ fast performance and seamless failover
for business continuity, and the commitment that a company like HP
provides,” said Michael York, senior systems engineer, Asante. “After
implementing the HP Medical Archive solution, Asante is on target to
achieve a 230 percent return on investment over a five year period.”

HP MAS 3.0 delivers factory-integrated HP ProLiant servers, HP
StorageWorks SAN and MSA disk storage with indexing, policy management
and search software to provide long-term retention of medical fixed
content. The grid architecture of MAS satisfies the scalability and
performance requirements of healthcare providers at an affordable
price. The tiered storage of the MAS grid ensures healthcare providers
can align the business value of images with appropriate retention
policies.

“The need for online medical image archiving and storage has
skyrocketed in the last few years, with IT staffers and technicians
trying to cope with more data, more patients and more work,” said Robin
Purohit, vice president and general manager, Information Management,
Software, HP. “By bringing MAS to the ‘masses’ – small and large
customers alike – we have dramatically increased the number of
organizations that can benefit from having easy access to the right
patient information at the right time. HP is empowering more healthcare
providers to improve overall patient care.”

HP MAS 3.0 provides new or enhanced capabilities in three main areas:

Improves patient care

• High Availability Gateway provides “always-on” grid access to
  medical images, documents and lab reports, even in the event of
  multiple site failures;
• Image Management Layer support and certifications with more than 30
  Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) vendors make it
  easier for physicians within a hospital or across a group of hospitals
  to access patient information and share diagnostic data when
  collaborating on a patient’s treatment.

Increases storage flexibility and reduces costs

• Ability to create and manage multiple tiers of storage within the
  MAS grid – including SAN, SCSI, SATA and tape – enables alignment of
  storage costs and retention policies with clinical value of images;
• New Compact product line option offers entry-level prices starting
  at $60,000 for organizations that do not require multi-tier archiving.

Enhances operational efficiency and regulatory compliance

• Linux operating environment enables use of standard system management tools to simplify operations;
• HP ProLiant DL320s storage servers in the Compact product line increase rack density and reduce data center footprint;
  Encryption as a standard security feature helps protect patient
  privacy as medical images are transferred across local or remote
  networks.

Thomas Vaughan, director of IT Infrastructure, Roswell Park Cancer
Institute (RPCI), explained his experiences with HP MAS. “At RPCI, we
needed a solution that would improve storage capacity and performance,
archive medical images, be highly scalable, meet HIPAA and other
government regulations, and offer disaster recovery and business
continuity,” said Vaughan. “When compared to other offerings that we
examined, HP stood out as the one company that took care of all our
needs.”

HP MAS 3.0 is currently available.

Hewlett-Packard

Roswell Park Cancer
Institute

Asante Health System