HP Helps Healthcare Providers Improve Patient Care, Regulatory Compliance with Medical Archiving Solution

HP today introduced a specialized archiving platform to help global healthcare providers, hospitals and imaging clinics of all sizes meet rapidly expanding retention requirements for medical images.

With the HP Medical Archive solution (MAS) 3.0, healthcare providers can strengthen their focus on improving patient care while also adhering to strict compliance regulations by ensuring that medical image data is securely indexed, preserved and accessible.

Healthcare organizations are challenged with ensuring that patient safety remains their No. 1 priority in the face of increasing costs, labor shortages and reduced reimbursements for procedures. At the same time, the medical imaging storage market is doubling every 24 months due to growing volumes of diagnostic images, medical documents and lab reports.

Asante Health System, a major healthcare provider in southern Oregon and northern California, selected HP MAS to help improve patient care by providing greater access to critical patient information.

“Key factors that drove our decision to move forward with HP were the ability to ‘grow as you go,’ fast performance and seamless failover for business continuity, and the commitment that a company like HP provides,” said Michael York, senior systems engineer, Asante. “After implementing the HP Medical Archive solution, Asante is on target to achieve a 230 percent return on investment over a five year period.”

HP MAS 3.0 delivers factory-integrated HP ProLiant servers, HP StorageWorks SAN and MSA disk storage with indexing, policy management and search software to provide long-term retention of medical fixed content. The grid architecture of MAS satisfies the scalability and performance requirements of healthcare providers at an affordable price. The tiered storage of the MAS grid ensures healthcare providers can align the business value of images with appropriate retention policies.

“The need for online medical image archiving and storage has skyrocketed in the last few years, with IT staffers and technicians trying to cope with more data, more patients and more work,” said Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager, Information Management, Software, HP. “By bringing MAS to the ‘masses’ – small and large customers alike – we have dramatically increased the number of organizations that can benefit from having easy access to the right patient information at the right time. HP is empowering more healthcare providers to improve overall patient care.”

Enhanced capabilities of HP MAS 3.0

HP MAS 3.0 provides new or enhanced capabilities in three main areas:

Improves patient care

High Availability Gateway provides “always-on” grid access to medical images, documents and lab reports, even in the event of multiple site failures;
Image Management Layer support and certifications with more than 30 Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) vendors make it easier for physicians within a hospital or across a group of hospitals to access patient information and share diagnostic data when collaborating on a patient’s treatment.

Increases storage flexibility and reduces costs

Ability to create and manage multiple tiers of storage within the MAS grid – including SAN, SCSI, SATA and tape – enables alignment of storage costs and retention policies with clinical value of images;
New Compact product line option offers entry-level prices starting at $60,000 for organizations that do not require multi-tier archiving.

Enhances operational efficiency and regulatory compliance

Linux operating environment enables use of standard system management tools to simplify operations;
HP ProLiant DL320s storage servers in the Compact product line increase rack density and reduce data center footprint;
Encryption as a standard security feature helps protect patient privacy as medical images are transferred across local or remote networks.

Thomas Vaughan, director of IT Infrastructure, Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI), explained his experiences with HP MAS. “At RPCI, we needed a solution that would improve storage capacity and performance, archive medical images, be highly scalable, meet HIPAA and other government regulations, and offer disaster recovery and business continuity,” said Vaughan. “When compared to other offerings that we examined, HP stood out as the one company that took care of all our needs.”

HP MAS 3.0 is currently available. More information about the HP Medical Archive solution is available at www.hp.com/go/mas.

About HP

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $104.3 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.