CHICAGO, April 4 — Carestream Health, Inc., announced that its CARESTREAM eHealth Managed Services (eMS) now manages 10 million imaging studies—representing more than 500 terabytes of data—worldwide. The company operates eight data centers in five countries to service healthcare providers throughout North America and Europe.
“Outsourcing clinical data management to a service provider allows multiple healthcare facilities to leverage and share a common data center platform and pay only a fraction of the total cost based on their own utilization,” said Patrick Koch, Worldwide Business Director, eHealth Managed Services. “Our eHealth Managed Services offering also equips healthcare systems with a smooth and easy way of selectively and securely sharing information among multiple locations within their enterprise.”
He added that contracting with an outside data services company is becoming an increasingly popular way for healthcare providers to reduce capital expenses since hardware, software, maintenance, monitoring, upgrades and obsolescence management are included as part of the service.
Carestream Health’s eMS portfolio includes a data protection service that delivers cost-effective remote back up data storage to help healthcare providers comply with disaster recovery/business continuity regulations. It also offers a remote archiving service that delivers all the all functionality of an on-site archive without the burden of equipment, personnel and related expenses. This archiving service supports pre-fetching of relevant priors and on-line DICOM queries. It also provides a DICOM-based, vendor-neutral archive that can serve any PACS system, which protects users against hardware or software obsolescence. eMS also provides continuous and proactive systems monitoring, tracking and reporting of data storage levels and storage expansion.
“We selected eMS to manage our data for disaster recovery because it stores imaging studies in a DICOM format to protect data integrity. The company also demonstrated its ability to quickly restore our records in the event of a disaster,” said Terry Woodbeck, CEO, Tulsa Spine and Specialty Hospital, Tulsa, Okla. The hospital uses the service for secure off-site storage of patient information, x-ray imaging studies and accounting records.
Advanced Workflow Functionality Available
CARESTREAM eHealth Managed Services can manage a centralized data center at a single location or it can enable a virtual archive that permits storage and access to data that is stored at multiple sites throughout a healthcare system’s network. Advanced workflow functionality includes selective forwarding of exams between sites or pre-fetching of prior exams. All services are priced based on the number of imaging studies and storage space required.
The company is also showing as a work in progress a new Web-based portal that will equip authorized users at a healthcare institution to access patient data and images from a remote Carestream Health data center.
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About Carestream Health, Inc.
Carestream Health, Inc., is a leading provider of dental and medical imaging systems and healthcare IT solutions; molecular imaging systems for the life science research and drug discovery/development market segments; and x-ray film and digital x-ray products for the non-destructive testing market. Headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., and serving customers in more than 150 countries, Carestream Health is an independent company operating within the family of companies owned by Onex Corporation (TSX: OCX.TO) of Toronto, Canada. For more information about Carestream Health, contact your Carestream Health representative or visit www.carestreamhealth.com.
CARESTREAM is a trademark of Carestream Health, Inc.
2009