Iron Mountain Delivers Cloud-Based, Vendor Neutral Storage for Patient Data

Iron Mountain Incorporated has added vendor neutral functionality to its enterprise-level archive – the Digital Record Center 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 is lower costs, enhanced image sharing ability, 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, Inc., 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."