Texas Regional Medical Center Selecting Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain, Inc. announced that the Texas Regional Medical Center
(TRMC) has chosen Iron Mountain’s vendor neutral archive (VNA) and cloud
storage solution to manage its CT scans, MRIs, X-rays and other diagnostic
image volume.

The Dallas-based for-profit hospital will implement VNA to lower overall medical data storage costs, provide caregivers
better access to images, and improve DR by moving data securely
offsite. Iron Mountain also announced the addition of new retention management
functionality to its VNA to help hospitals identify and properly archive or
destroy obsolete medical data.

Lowering storage costs, focusing on
patient care
Like other hospitals, the Texas Regional Medical Center views and
stores medical images through Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS).
These systems generate massive amounts of data, driven by higher-resolution
images and the popularity of imaging as a diagnostic tool. Often, the data is
stored across multiple departments, each with its own PACS for storing a
specific type of image. This network of PACS creates silos that trap
information and inhibit physicians from viewing a patient’s full medical
history, forcing hospital technology leaders to manage expensive and complex processes
for storing and sharing medical image data. And, because hospitals update or
replace their PACS every few years, they are forced to migrate images from one
PACS to the next.

The Texas Regional Medical Center implemented VNA
and cloud-based archiving solution to help them address their medical imaging
data growth, while also helping them better protect their data in the event of
disaster by moving the information offsite. This will enable TRMC to reduce the
cost and complexity of managing that data while meeting HIPAA compliance
requirements for DR and business continuity. Additionally, they
plan to use the VNA to help them prepare for the eventual challenges of system
interoperability and data retention, both of which will become more acute
challenges as TRMC grows and expands its footprint of clinical operations.

"As a for-profit
hospital, our technology investments must provide efficiency and cost-savings,
solving our current and future needs while also helping to ensure a higher
quality of patient care," said Rob McDonald, CIO of Texas Regional
Medical Center. "When we started
looking for a technology solution for our medical imaging data, we had a
specific agenda: Choose a partner capable of growing with us and handling our
storage, access, compliance and data retention needs. Iron Mountain fits
perfectly as a partner with the capability and expertise to help us bridge the
gap between now and the future. Their solution solves our storage and
compliance needs, while ensuring we have the most cost-effective and efficient
solution that frees up our staff to focus on patient care."

New retention and lifecycle management functionality
Relieve the
pressures of storage & complianceThe growth of medical data brings the additional challenge
of straining storage and management capacity, complicated by regulatory
requirements for archiving and protecting this data, also known as information
lifecycle management. The solution is to archive or delete obsolete information
– data that exceeded its ‘retention period’ and no longer needed to satisfy
regulatory (e.g. HIPAA) or clinical care requirements.

To address retention and
lifecycle management, hospitals must have an understanding of their legal and
clinical requirements as well as the capability to manage the retention and
destruction of date based on retention policies. VNA manages
the archiving process and data is tiered so that inactive data is stored using
more economical storage systems over time; destruction is managed based on
policies created within the VNA to destroy data that has exceeded the required
retention period. And, in addition to encouraging customers to use these
retention capabilities in the VNA, Iron Mountain also provides consulting
services to help healthcare organizations develop the policies needed to
effectively utilize these capabilities.

Iron Mountain’s vendor neutral archive provides healthcare
organizations with an enterprise-wide repository for storing, accessing and managing
medical images and other patient data. Customers like TRMC use it to
consolidate medical imaging studies and patient data – traditionally stored in
departmental-level archives found in radiology, cardiology and other areas of
the hospital – into a single archive. Additionally, they can leverage the
solution’s data retention management capabilities to delete inactive data when
no longer required for clinical or compliance reasons. The net impact is lower
costs, enhanced image sharing ability, better reliability and security, and
ultimately improved patient care.

"The typical hospital system’s archive data
grows at a rate of more than 40 percent year-over-year, straining storage and
management resources," said Ken Rubin, senior vice president and general
manager, healthcare services for Iron Mountain. "Providers are looking for more control over their information while
also looking to reduce the cost and complexity of managing this data. Our VNA
allows them to liberate their data from their PACS to solve data sharing and
access issues, removing the burden of managing their archiving and disaster
recovery functions to focus on delivering a higher quality of patient care. The
new retention management capability enables hospitals to substantially reduce their
data storage costs even further. Providers like TRMC recognize that our single
solution can solve these complex challenges, which is the reason why our VNA
and cloud services have grown over 100 percent for each of the past three
years."