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.

HP Licenses Technology to Create Nanoscale Electronic Devices

HP today announced that it is beginning to reap returns from its 10-year investment in nanoscale electronics with the licensing of technology that could enable the fabrication of semiconductor chips significantly more powerful than those available today.

The technology involves a process called nanoimprint lithography (NIL) – a method of literally stamping out patterns of wires less than 50 atoms wide on a substrate. HP Labs researchers have created patented NIL technology, which has enabled the fabrication of laboratory prototype circuits with wire widths of 15 nanometers – about one-third the dimension of the features in the most advanced circuits that will be commercially available this year.

Once the NIL “master” is created, copies can be stamped out quickly and inexpensively, like manufacturing CDs or phonograph records. The patterns are then filled in with metals for the wires.

HP has licensed the technology to Nanolithosolutions, Inc., of Carlsbad, Calif., which has developed a tool based on HP’s technology. The tool consists of a module that fits into a mask aligner. The module is used to create the patterns for wires and transistors on a substrate. The tool is simple and inexpensive to use and turns commonly available mask aligners into high-resolution NIL machines. The technology is also being offered to others through HP’s Intellectual Property Licensing organization.

“By building on HP’s extensive research in nanoimprint lithography, we believe we have a tool that will enable reliable, repeatable processes for exploring biochips, photonics chips and many other applications,” said Bo Pi, chief executive officer, Nanolithosolutions. “We believe this will be an extremely useful tool for academic and commercial users worldwide because it will be about a tenth the cost of current technology.”

Nanolithosolutions was created by Pi and Yong Chen, a UCLA professor and former member of HP Labs. HP also has an equity stake in the company. Further details of the arrangements were not disclosed.

“Because HP and other companies need unique tools to conduct nanoscale research and development, we created the underlying technology that makes this tool possible,” said Stan Williams, HP Senior Fellow and director, Quantum Science Research, HP Labs. “But we rely on innovative companies like Nanolithosolutions to do the additional engineering necessary to make user-friendly tools commercially available. This will help create future generations of chips that will go beyond the capabilities of today’s fabrication technologies at an affordable cost.”

HP encourages others to leverage its vast research and development network and portfolio of nearly 30,000 patents and quickly bring new technologies to market through intellectual property licensing agreements. These agreements also enable HP to generate a return on its R&D investment through licensing fees and royalties. More information on HP’s intellectual property licensing program is available at www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/iplicensing/.

HP Helps University of Utah Health Care Improve Patient Care and Lower Costs Through IT Consolidation

HP customer University of Utah Health Care is realizing patient care goals and holding flat staff increases through an IT consolidation project that helped improve its overall business technology.

With an HP BladeSystem IT Consolidation Solution in place, the center is cutting desktop support costs by 100 percent and achieving 11 times improvement in server team productivity.

According to an independent study released today by Thoughtware Worldwide, HP helped the university achieve a 346 percent return on investment, $4.8 million in savings and 146 percent internal rate of return over a three-year period.(1) At the same time, doctors now have up-to-date information about patients with a consolidation solution that leverages virtualization and HP software technologies.

“With HP’s help, we have succeeded in transforming the University of Utah Health Care’s technology infrastructure so that it is successfully driving the business of operating a teaching and research hospital,” said Jim Livingston, director, Data Resource Center, University of Utah Health Care. “HP’s IT Consolidation Solutions enabled us to meet our growth objectives, reduce costs, free up resources for innovation and, most importantly, meet our patient care goals.”

Consolidated IT technology provides enhanced performance and cost savings

University of Utah Health Care handles more than 900,000 outpatient visits and 23,000 inpatient admissions a year. Rapid growth and cutting-edge programs had put its data center, which housed more than 350 servers, under extreme stress. It had run out of space, power and cooling capacity. At the same time, the university was challenged to maintain IT alignment with its growth and medical goals.

Facing the possibility of a $7 million data center expansion, the hospital worked with HP on an IT approach that would make it possible to simultaneously reduce cost and enhance performance, allowing the university to focus on continued improvement of patient care. HP implemented an IT infrastructure that delivers better business outcomes, including:

• Increased value and lower hardware costs – With the help of HP Services, the university consolidated 150 database, application and Citrix physical servers onto 10 HP ProLiant BL20p and BL25p server blades with VMware infrastructure. This approach achieved a 15:1 server consolidation and a reduction of the server growth requirement by more than 90 percent.


• Room for growth and reduced power and cooling costs – Installation of the HP BladeSystem p-Class allowed virtualized servers to replace physical servers that had been running at less than 10 percent utilization. By reducing physical servers by 25 percent, the university was able to cut power and cooling consumption and free up space needed to accommodate growth within the confines of the existing data center.


• Staff savings -- Through the automation of tasks, the university was able to avoid a planned increase from 20 to 40 desktop support staff, resulting in a 100 percent staff cost savings.


• Protecting critical business information – Better insight into and control over the IT environment ensures that the university’s sensitive information is protected and delivered to the right people when they need it – in many cases, providing doctors with the most up-to-date medical records possible.


• Ensuring system availability for medical staff – HP Business Technology Optimization software, including HP Network Management Center and HP Operations Center, provides the university the needed insight and control over network and server functions, performance and availability, as well service-level objectives – providing 99.999 percent uptime of mission-critical applications on a 24x7 basis. Additionally, HP Systems Insight Manager helps the university’s IT staff monitor server systems, delivering real-time server utilization information as well as trending information on critical transactions and data server health for proactive monitoring and response.

University of Utah Health Care has transformed its IT environment to have a critical role in driving success for its overall business,” said Steve Fink, worldwide director, IT Consolidation Solutions, HP. “HP is extremely proud to have played a role in helping the university achieve a 346 percent return on investment and improved health care for its patients at the same time.”

HP offers a wide range of IT Consolidation Solutions that map to an organization’s specific business objectives and IT requirements, helping them to lower cost, accelerate business growth and reduce risk. Specific solution offerings include IT management consolidation, network consolidation, server consolidation, storage consolidation and workplace consolidation. Additional information about HP’s solutions for IT consolidation is available at www.hp.com/go/itconsolidation

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 $94.1 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com



(1) Thoughtware Worldwide, LLC, is a San Francisco-based firm specializing in investment decisions and value management. The complete University of Utah Health Care case study is available at www.thoughtwareworldwide.com/downloads/UUHSC_F.pdf