Posts Tagged ‘image lifecycle management’

August 23, 2012

So let’s take a look at a few of the different types of imaging organizations:

• One or Two Radiologists in Private Practice
• Teleradiology Practice with (25) Radiologists
• Large Hospital System with Multiple Imaging “ologies”
• Imaging Center Company with (6) Locations
• (12) Member IDN
• Etc., etc.

No one would question that the medical imaging industry encompasses a diverse community of health care professionals and organizations. From the perspective of long term electronic image and data management, these organizations face different challenges to be sure, but they also share some common regulatory requirements and business challenges as well.

Any medical imaging organization, large or small, is required by the HIPAA Security Rule to maintain multiple, secure copies of diagnostic study data for disaster recovery in the event of a catastrophic data loss, as well as a business continuance contingency plan to maintain services in the event of an interruption to normal clinical operations.

After that it’s pretty much up to the imaging organization as far as the implementation of clinical and technological “best practices” for image and document sharing (XDS, XDSi, etc.), system interoperability, standards conformance, etc. It sounds like there is no “one size fits all” panacea solution for this diverse group. Or is there?

For more details…

Please click on “View Now” to watch this brief, informative video. We hope you enjoy the presentation. We’ll be posting fresh content on our site several times a week at least, so make sure you frequently check us out for new videos, blogs, technical papers, and other useful information related to the medical imaging industry.

Want to receive an email notification when we post a new, informative video or blog? It takes less than a minute. Click on this link, http://deepwellarchive.com/news/, and sign up today!

July 12, 2012

And when you’re talking about diagnostic study data with seven year retention periods (minimum), a one time ingestion fee for the life of the information vs. recurring storage costs for:

• Capital acquisition costs for hardware and software
• Hardware and software maintenance
• System administration costs
• Technology refresh and migration costs
• Capacity expansions
• Data protection costs
• Data center resource costs
• Power, cooling and bandwidth costs

…starts to look pretty attractive. That’s a one-time cost incurred on the month the data is ingested, and zero cost for months (2)-(72).

Oftentimes the very real recurring costs referenced above, are left out of the equation when imaging organizations consider the costs to provide long term data preservation for their study data. The sad reality is also that many of these costs cannot be recovered or used to directly offset income either. The management costs, for example, although they are very real cannot be easily recovered as a direct expense. Capital expenses for hardware and software, although again very tangible, are subject to multi-year depreciation schedules and so are also not directly recoverable as offsets to income. So imaging organizations get stuck with big bills for long term storage and data preservation, without being able to easily deduct the associated expenses. That doesn’t sound fair!

Well it isn’t fair, but there is an alternative! Low, one-time storage costs, accounted for as a 100% offset to income each month. Hard to believe? Consider cloud based image storage.

For more details…

Please click on “View Now” to watch this brief, informative video. We hope you enjoy the presentation. We’ll be posting fresh content on our site several times a week at least, so make sure you frequently check us out for new videos, blogs, technical papers, and other useful information related to the medical imaging industry.

Want to receive an email notification when we post a new, informative video or blog? It takes less than a minute. Click on this link, http://deepwellarchive.com/news/, and sign up today!

Medical Image Archive: If the Storage Were Free, the Cloud Would Be Cheaper…and Better!

July 27, 2012

That’s a pretty bold statement, but we can back it up.

The typical costs to deliver and maintain sustainable archive storage include:

• Capital acquisition costs for hardware and software
• Hardware and software maintenance
• System administration costs
• Technology refresh and data migration costs
• Capacity expansions, data protection costs
• Storage interoperability issues
• Data center resource costs, power, cooling and bandwidth costs

So get rid of the capital costs for storage hardware and software and what happens? Not much. Even in a year where a storage/archive capital purchase (new implementation or capacity expansion) takes place, the “capex” is typically only 30% or less of the TCO for that year.

Not sure if we adequately backed up our statement? For more details…

Please click on “View Now” to watch this brief, informative video. We hope you enjoy the presentation. We’ll be posting fresh content on our site several times a week at least, so make sure you frequently check us out for new videos, blogs, technical papers, and other useful information related to the medical imaging industry.

Want to receive and email notification when we post a new, informative video or blog? It takes less than a minute. Click on this link, http://deepwellarchive.com/news/, and sign up today!

If It Appreciates, Buy It. If It Depreciates, Lease It!

June 25, 2012

And maybe we should add, “If it generates revenue for you business, buy it” as well. In the medical imaging business, some things you should NEVER consider buying:

• ARCHIVE STORAGE!

Think about it for a minute. Archive storage is an absolute “must have” for any imaging organization that generates diagnostic study data. Compliance regulations typically require a seven year minimum retention for the data, and priors are almost always required for comprehensive diagnostic capability. So we all agree that archive storage is a necessity. I think that we all also agree that preserving electronic information for  retention periods of seven years and up is an exceedingly difficult task for any IT organization.

Until recently, the only logical choice for long term diagnostic study preservation was to purchase, implement, and manage your own archive storage infrastructure.

When you really sit down and think about it, the value of any diagnostic imaging procedure is in the ultimate patient outcome. The images, and the eyes, education and experience of the doc doing the primary read, the peer review docs, and the tech team doing analysis and image processing are the core assets in any imaging organization. Everything else should be intended to support that core team.

Medical imaging technology assets, surrounding the actual image data itself, especially archive storage, can and should be accessed without any capital investments or ownership. Storage is ancillary to the core team and core diagnostic assets, but still a necessity. Utilizing cloud-based technology services for non-core functions offers clinical, technological, and financial advantages that are just too compelling to ignore.

For more details…

Please click on “View Now” to watch this brief, informative video. We hope you enjoy the presentation. We’ll be posting fresh content on our site several times a week at least, so make sure you frequently check us out for new videos, blogs, technical papers, and other useful information related to the medical imaging industry.

Want to receive an email notification when we post a new, informative video or blog? It takes less than a minute. Click on this link, http://deepwellarchive.com/news/, and sign up today!

June 18, 2012

The ‘A’ in PACS…

PACS, or Picture Archive and Communication System, is an integrated technology solution designed for the management, viewing, sharing, temporary and long-term storage of medical image data acquired from diagnostic imaging equipment. Today we’d like to define the “A” in PACS, or the archive portion of a PACS solution.

In general technology terms, “archive” implies the long term storage, or more aptly put, the long term preservation of a file or electronic record of some sort. In the context of a PACS, the file is typically an image file, or rather a combination of image files, comprising an imaging study. There may be textual or audio reports associated with the file as well. These images must not only be stored for the long term, but they must be cataloged and easily recovered from the archive for many years into the future (typically 7 years and longer).

In broad terms, the long term preservation of medical image files must be accomplished in order for medical imaging organizations to be compliant with industry regulations and certifying organizations, i.e. HIPAA, The Joint Commission, ACR, etc., as well as to provide long term access to these images for clinical, diagnostic and legal purposes.

As images age and become less valuable from a business perspective, i.e. after the initial diagnosis and subsequent reimbursement or payment to the practice, they must be kept for long periods of time, typically seven years or longer, on a storage medium other than spinning magnetic disk. These long term storage mediums have most typically consisted of Magneto Optical and magnetic tape, until recently. The diagnostic studies lose business value fairly quickly, but maintain a high clinical, compliance and legal value over time.

There are many difficult challenges associated with providing long term image archival, and many different solutions, which we will explore in subsequent posts.

We hope you enjoy the video presentation. We’ll be posting fresh content on our site several times a week at least.

Want to receive and email notification when we post a new, informative video or blog? It takes less than a minute. Click on this link, http://deepwellarchive.com/news/, and sign up today!