Health Imaging & IT - August 2008 - (Page 30)

The Business Continuity Plan: Creating a Secure Imaging Infrastructure an EMC Centera in house and when it contemplated integration, a one-vendor solution made sense for moving data from one platform to another. He says that they took all of their applications and classified them into three different categories: mission critical, business critical and business important. “The category designation denotes how it gets connected to the SAN,” he notes. Zinno concludes that by shifting approximately 70 percent of the health system’s data to the SAN, Atlantic Health has enhanced backup and disaster recovery capabilities by enabling disk-to-disk backups and real-time data replication and mirroring between our primary and backup data centers. Seamless, continual data transmission Like many regional medical centers using locum tenens coverage for diagnostic reads, the 220-bed Charlotte Regional Medical Center in Punta Gorda, Fla., found uninterrupted workflow and quick report turn-around times to challenging. Additionally, proprietary communications blockages between different PACS and RIS applications at other HMA hospitals result- ed in the inability to transmit images and patient information between sites for consults or workload balancing. The medical center contracted with teleradiology provider E-Rad Solutions to tackle night-time reads, gaining the benefits of the MEDxConnect system from Compressus. According to Gail Hopkins, director of medical imaging at Charlotte Regional, they quickly realized the value of the Compressus system when the RIS they installed in March went down for more than 15 hours. By kicking off orders to Compressus, radiologists offsite were able to dictate with voice recognition into a separate system. Once the RIS was operational again, all it took was copying and pasting cases from the Compressus server back into the RIS. “Having a downtime plan is a wonderful thing,” she concludes. “But I did not have a RIS. The only way we maintained operations was because we were able to push images to the Compressus system.” avoiding downtime Disaster recovery might be the nuts and bolts of business continuity within healthcare, however, it is really more about the effect disasters— both natural and human-induced—have on business operations. “It is not just how you connect a server to your infrastructure, but what that means to your business,” says Chris Tomlinson, director of radiology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). For radiology, the hospital started calculating the cost of one hour of downtime and what was affected across the entire organization to make better decisions regarding the architecture of its systems and all permutations of different downtime scenarios. CHOP has had fully redundant, geographically dispersed solutions both from the PACS itself and continuing through the tiered storage solution (ILM Strategy) from IBM called the MAS (Medical Archive Solution). More importantly, there is a fully integrated disaster recovery/continuity plan that exists for all the radiology systems. Three months ago, CHOP contracted with Acuo Technologies to deploy its AcuoMed solution, which enables vendor-neutral archiving, transporting, tracking and retrieving digital images across an entire network, communicating with different DICOM storage devices throughout CHOP’s imaging environment, not just in radiology. Acuo’s system will act as middleware to the IBM Medical Archive Solution already deployed across the hospital’s imaging departments. CHOP also will upgrade its IBM MAS to the IBM GMAS or grid based MAS as part of the Acuo project for storage virtualization. “We have designed the AcuoMed software to be fully redundant and geographically dispersed,” he adds. Additionally, the vendor-neutral solution will eliminate any future data migration costs for CHOP. With IBM and Acuo, the hospital will have two data centers, running in tandem. Many healthcare organizations have shifted data priorities, transitioning from thinking in terms of disaster recovery to the concept of business continuity as an essential part of day-to-day operations. Healthimaging.com Innovation Confidence Life f Powerful Tools at Your Fingertips At EDDA, we build advanced clinical applications to bring a new generation of interactive decision aid solutions for your needs in early detection, diagnosis and treatment. • • • • • Intuitive & efficient Lesion specific enhancement & analysis Advanced 3D/4D visualization Volumetric segmentation, editing & quantification Enterprise-wide solution for seamless workflow in PACS IQQA®-Chest CAD for DR/CR IQQA®-Liver for multi-phase contrast CT www.edda-tech.com • 609-919-9889 30 Health Imaging & IT | august 2008 http://www.edda-tech.com http://www.edda-tech.com http://HealthImaging.com

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Health Imaging & IT - August 2008

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