scality

Medical imaging archive

Enabling efficient PACS workflow while lowering TCO with medical imaging storage

Availability matters; perhaps more in healthcare medical imaging data storage than anywhere, because patient care is at stake. Ensuring that electronic patient health information (ePHI) is kept safe, intact and available – readily and quickly – is critical to care team productivity and patient care. Ever-improving imaging technology, an aging population and long retention requirements mean that medical imaging stores are growing fast. And, as ePHI across the healthcare continuum becomes the norm – and mandated – departmental PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) and specialty-specific islands are unacceptable.

MORE UNITY WITH DATA STORAGE

Regulators, clinicians and patients themselves are demanding a more unified and accessible electronic health record (EHR). Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) on easily, infinitely scalable storage is the key to accessibility across an institution and among multiple institutions. A more unified and accessible Enterprise Imaging Archive ensures that images are intact, available and accessible to authorized users, while safe from intrusion by those who are not authorized.

MEDICAL IMAGING STORAGE ISSUES

SECURITY, COST AND AVAILABILITY

PRIVACY

Keep data safe to reduce breach risk—and associated regulatory penalties.
ACCESS

Clinicians demand fast access. Don’t slow them down with priors pre-fetch waits.
COST

Low reimbursements mean cost pressures. Keeping infrastructure and administrative costs low leaves more for patient care.
RESILIENCY

Images need not only to be available, but also intact. Corruption or degradation to the image or to the medium on which it’s stored is unacceptable, and compromises patient care.

THE LANDSCAPE

MEDICAL IMAGING AND BEYOND

Medical advancements continue at a blistering pace across diagnostic and therapeutic domains, with progress in genomics/clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) gene editing tools, the microbiome, immunotherapy, medical 3D printing, nanomedical tools, augmented reality and wearable sensors/dispensers. There’s even talk of holographics. All of this needs to be stored*.

By 2030, over 75 million Americans will be over the age of 65. Living longer means more chronic disease, more falls and orthopedic injuries—more imaging, more extensive health records.

HIMSS Analytics market insight study shows PACS adoption across healthcare at high level, still many opportunities for growth: technology to store, share and provide universal access to images.

Emergency departments using image-enabled health information exchanges (HIEs) were 8.7% less likely to repeat CT scans, 9% less likely to repeat ultrasounds and 13% less likely to repeat chest x-rays. These decreases alone are enough to save $19 million dollars annually across the United States, and reduce patient exposure to tests.

The FDA is cracking-down on data loss. The FDA said that proper investment in PACS infrastructure, including cloud-based archiving solutions, could prevent the catastrophic loss of images.

*Gartner Research note: 06 February 2017, ID:G00313233 Analyst(s): ViShaffer, Laura Craft, Steven LeFebure

EXPERT STORAGE PREDICTIONS AND TRENDS

GROWING COSTS

Medical imaging constitutes between 7.5 and 10% of total health-care expenditure.
OVERSIGHT

Regulatory oversight is strong, with national and regional rules governing retention, availability, privacy and security.
SIZE

Medical imaging stores just in U.S. hospitals grew to more than 27,000 terabytes in the last decade.
STORAGE

PACS storage requirements will grow 17% globally.
VNA

25% of U.S. healthcare delivery organizations will have implemented a vendor-neutral archive.
ANALYTICS AND DATA

There is a growing trend toward mining the value of images and other medical data through analytics.
PUBLIC CLOUD

Public cloud service providers will process more than 35% of healthcare IT.
UNSTRUCTURED CONTENT

30% of all unstructured clinical content will be found within a VNA.

SCALITY RING VALUE PROPOSITION

WHAT MAKES SCALITY SPECIAL FOR MEDICAL CLOUD STORAGE

Scality RING makes it feasible to keep more patient data actively available – on spinning disk – eliminating the wait for fulfillment of medical records requests. You can’t beat 100% availability for keeping things moving. And, thanks to advanced volume protection options, you can even eliminate resource-consuming traditional backups, because data is fully protected. A strong ally in your plan to meet national and regional data availability, retention and security compliance requirements, it enables access via HTTPS with password authentication and Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and AES-256 encryption ensure data security. Scality RING’s multi-geo options distribute data across availability zones to ensure access even when an entire data center is lost.

Resources saved on storage can be put to direct patient care. Scality keeps TCO low by allowing mix and match standard servers. Unlike conventional storage, this enables worry-free capacity expansion (from 100’s of Terabytes to 100’s of Petabytes) as the data is managed by software and not tied to appliance form factors. And, eliminating tape and tape transport could reduce breach vulnerability; reducing the financial risk associated with fines.

LOWER COSTS

Scality RING is the only storage solution to lower TCO by allowing a mix and match of standard servers. Unlike conventional storage, Scality RING enables worry-free capacity expansion, upgrade and swap-out as data is managed by the software, and not tied to appliance form factors.
MIXED WORKLOADS

Scality has the performance and low latency to address 80% of storage workloads across small and large files and objects, high bandwidth and IOPS and all in one single multi-application environment that supports multiple file & object protocols so that a single storage infrastructure can accommodate both files and objects.
SAFER DATA

Data is protected with policy-based replication, erasure coding, and geo-distribution, achieving 14X9s of durability. Cross- region replication to Scality RING and AWS S3, and native file and object support. Policy based data protection with self-healing.
ALWAYS AVAILABLE

Compliance isn’t just about security and data integrity; availability is key, too. Unlike conventional NAS, Scality enables high availability and up to 14 nines durability, including multi-site options to tolerate entire site failure and eliminate the need for cumbersome backups. And failover in geo-distributed deployments means that patient care is never halted due to site failure.
STORAGE EXPERTISE

Changing storage shouldn’t require changing hardware, and the applications customers use should work seamlessly. Scality teams with top server vendors (and runs on any x86). We work closely with the vendors of solutions that are in place: PACS, VNA and more, to ensure interoperability.
PERFECT FIT

Scality Support & Services help ensure our customers have the tools and support they need to be successful with the Scality RING: from service to training to custom work and Proof of Concept systems.

MEDICAL IMAGING - APPLICATION PARTNERS

Archive storage for patient health information.

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HEALTHCARE CLIENTS

MEDICAL SOLUTIONS

Scality RING is keeping medical images and other healthcare data secure, intact and available at many medical institutions around the world, including these:

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AP-HM

AP-HM’s private “health cloud” secures massive, growing volumes of data

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University Hospital Basel

Pioneering research hospital turns big data into an asset for fighting cancer and other complex diseases

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Lancaster General Health

Nationally ranked institution simplifies its medical imaging environment with Scality

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