Partnership Initiated To Help Hospitals and Imaging Centers Store Diagnostic Images

(San Francisco, CA, USA) has signed an agreement with Iron Mountain, Inc. (Boston, MA, USA) to provide its hospital and imaging center customers a new service for protecting and storing their diagnostic images. The agreement is designed to closely integrate McKesson's Horizon Medical Imaging's picture archiving and communication system (PACS) with Iron Mountain's Digital Record Center for Medical Images.

Healthcare providers are confronted with a twofold problem--safely archiving patient images while protecting them from disaster and balancing the need to provide the entire care team with ready access to vital patient data. This complexity has led many facilities to implement separate systems for long-term archiving and disaster recovery, adding cost and redundancy to an already expensive problem. Facilities of all sizes and complexities are looking for an automated system that mitigates their risk and reduces their operational budget.

"Our customers must continually manage ever-greater amounts of image data that require secure off-site storage and increase operational costs,” said Rod O'Reilly, president of McKesson's Medical Imaging Group. "With this relationship, we can assist our customers by reducing their long-term storage costs while also supporting customers in their efforts to comply with regulations for disaster recovery.”

"Through this agreement, hospitals and imaging centers receive one solution capable of both secure back-up and recoverability in the event of disaster and quick access to their patient records,” said Ken Rubin, senior vice president of strategic alliances for Iron Mountain, a provider of information protection and storage services. "By using a managed service, these institutions can better protect and preserve vital patient data and redeploy resources previously spent on in-house storage to patient care.”

The Horizon Medical Imaging PACS is the key component of McKesson's enterprise imaging product range. As a reporting and workflow system, Horizon Medical Imaging brings all of the patient's images together; enabling radiologists to deliver results more quickly to the attending care team. Tight integration and tools that streamline workflow and break down interdepartmental communication barriers provide significant value to the users and their patients.

Iron Mountain's Digital Record Center for Medical Images offers a fully managed "pay as you go” service. Customers avoid the capital expenditures and the management overhead inherent in managing backups and long-term preservation. Disaster recovery risks are mitigated because backups become an automatic, continuous process ensuring that studies are protected off-site and available for restoration if necessary. The archiving benefits include potentially dramatic cost savings and the avoidance of managing storage, data center costs, migration, and hardware obsolescence.

Iron Mountain helps organizations to reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The company provides comprehensive records management and data protection solutions, combined with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance, and disaster recovery.

McKesson is a healthcare services and information technology company that provides pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients.

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