Archiving is the bane of many a PACS manager’s professional responsibilities. No matter how hard a site works to forecast storage requirements, its plans can be undermined by the vagaries of digital image volume, image size, and distribution demands.
Newer modalities such as multislice CT, direct radiography, and digital mammography put even more stress on archives due to the large volume of data they generate. Faced with a tidal surge of images and information, many administrators are looking to application service provider (ASP) models to meet their storage-management needs.
Birmingham, AL-based Emageon has developed an ASP-based archive that may solve many of these dilemmas. The company offers a Web-enabled enterprise-wide archive software suite, e-CIMS, that features an integrated archive manager, workflow manager, and image distribution manager.
When a user requests a file via the service, a clinical Web viewer is auto-deployed on the customer's platform for image review. The software was designed and built as a pure Java DICOM archive to handle large-scale storage of diagnostic images, as well as provide open-system flexibility.
Emageon's archive manager can be dynamically configured without having to bring the archive off-line. Also, modalities can be added or changed on the system without affecting uptime. The archive interface lets users see the entire historical archive at all times.
A DICOM cache component, slated for beta-site delivery this week, offers rapid retrieval times for DICOM objects in distributed wide-area environments. The component provides transparent access to all images in one or more underlying archives across the enterprise. By caching active images (those most recently accessed and all those related) in local disk-based storage, the component speeds image access and reduces the load on the network infrastructure.
The back end of the archive workflow suite is an open systems hierarchical storage manager. Currently, Emageon’s installed base uses Louisville, CO-based Storage Technology's StorageTek 9840 tape with L700 or L180 tape libraries as archive media. The company has tested DVD-R media under laboratory conditions, but has not yet installed the technology at a production site. The company also has deployed some RAID-based media solutions at various sites.
Using Java as a development platform provides true operating-system independence, according to Gary York, Emageon's founder and its chief technology officer. In addition, the open solution provides extreme scalability for end-user configurations.
"We’ve tested the software with an archive of 55 million images and were able to sustain 300 simultaneous DICOM connections, with no degradation in performance, to an image server," York said.
The company offers its products and services solely on a per-use basis. A hospital or imaging center pays Emageon for each archived study generated by the institution, with no up-front charges. The cost of approximately $5 per study includes all hardware and software needed to deploy the enterprise-class image and report repository.
Emageon's customers are billed monthly, and the price point covers the lifetime of the study. "We also provide all integration with a user’s installed systems, as well as implementation, performance, and technology upgrades," said Noel Gartman, Emageon's vice president of marketing and strategy. The service is currently available only in the U.S., although the company plans to roll out international implementation of the product sometime in 2001.
The allure of Emageon’s ASP archive solution has not gone unnoticed. At last month’s RSNA meeting in Chicago, the company announced private equity investments by Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare and Oakland, CA-based Kaiser Permanente. Each organization will gain a seat on Emageon’s board of directors.
Emageon also announced in October that it was selected as the exclusive image archive provider for HANYS Services, a subsidiary of the Rensselaer, NY-based Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS). The installation is slated to encompass more than 550 healthcare facilities in New York.
Imaging vendors have also been attracted to Emageon’s technology. This past June, Waukesha, WI-based GE Medical Systems selected Emageon’s enterprise archive software to manage the large-scale storage of diagnostic images for GE’s ASP business. In addition to offering the technology to its radiology customers, GE plans to make the service available to its cardiology users.
By Jonathan S. BatchelorAuntMinnie.com staff writer
December 18, 2000
Related Reading
GE forms new company to integrate healthcare information systems, September 1, 2000
Emageon signs deal with GE, June 2, 2000
Imageon changes name to Emageon, May 31, 2000
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