Iron Mountain With HP for Disaster Recovery and Archiving of Medical Images

Iron Mountain Incorporated
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."

Iron Mountain Incorporated

Hewlett-Packard