Hospital Slashes Storage With Digital Archive

Gwinnett Medical Center in Gwinnett, Georgia, has slashed diagnosis times and freed up thousands of square feet of storage space by deploying an ambitious digital archive system.

The hospital and its four acute care centers generate almost a half a million images a year encompassing X-rays, MRIs, and cardiology images, a process which creates vast volumes of physical data.

"Three years ago, for X-rays and MRIs, we were printing film and putting that in a library, says Rick Allen, Gwinnett's assistant vice president of information systems, explaining that other image-based medical records were also in paper format. Ultrasound and cardiology images were stored, respectively, on optical storage and DVDs.

The hassle of managing and storing all these different data formats prompted Gwinnett to deploy a Medical Archive Solution (MAS) from HP, which now serves as the Medical Center’s core digital archive.

More and more hospitals are now deploying what are known as Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), driven by increasingly stringent compliance requirements and rapidly expanding volumes of data.Gwinnett’s initial 10-Tbyte MAS, for example, has now grown to 200 Tbytes spread across 16 MSA devices and around a dozen ProLiant servers.

”Radiology images were our initial foray; we have since followed that up with all of our cardiology, ultrasounds, and EKGs,” says Allen. “All of the images from our medical records are also on there.”

The exec explains that the digital archive has freed up almost the half of the 5,000 square feet used as physical file libraries.

”When it’s space within the hospital, we want to reclaim as much of that as we can,” says Allen. “It’s care-delivery space and revenue-generating space.”

By removing its reliance on DVDs and optical disks, Gwinnett has also freed up three rack spaces across its two data centers, according to the exec.”With the growth that we have experienced, we would have overflowed the DVD and optical libraries,” he says, explaining that the media was destroyed after its images were migrated to the digital archive.

Gwinnett has also revolutionized the delivery of X-rays to doctors, who can now access critical images at the click of a button, without waiting for X-rays to be developed and delivered.

”Before, in the best case scenario, you’re talking about a 20- to 30-minute process to get a file to a radiologist,” explains Allen. “Now we take the X-ray, and it’s mounted straight into the PACS, so we have cut a 20- to 30-minute process down to three to five minutes.”

Gwinnett’s IT chief told Byte and Switch that the Center spent about $500,000 on the MAS hardware and software, although he estimates that the hospital achieved an 18-month ROI.

”It can cost about $7 per film for printing X-rays and MRIs; the cost just goes through the roof,” he says, adding that the overall infrastructure cost of shifting from physical to digital images was about $2 million.Three years ago, when the hospital was first considering its PACs deployment, HP was not the only vendor in the frame, and Allen also considered EMC’s Centera offering.

”Centera is the fixed-content monster out there,” he says, but adds that the hospital already deployed HP’s EVA devices elsewhere in its infrastructure. “Part of it was the relationship that we had with HP, [but] the MAS [also] has multiple options for input, whereas the Centera had one option -- we had to write to an API."

Despite all the benefits offered by the MSA, Allen admits that the digital archive has actually made his life a bit more difficult.

“When it was a film in someone else’s department, I never had to worry about it,” he explains. “It has become my responsibility now that it’s in the data center, but the plus is that there’s very little management required.”

The exec is now planning to deploy HP’s recently announced MAS upgrade, which contains smaller, denser storage servers capable of storing 160 Tbytes in a rack.“Because it has got that density, we can start reclaiming data center space now,” he says. ”That goes to the whole power and green issue; being able to do more in less space.”Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.