Customer Spotlight: Angel Medical Center Relieves Growing Pains with Storage Technology Refresh for MEDITECH EHR and Sectra PACS

CUSTOMER PROFILE

Angel Medical Center is a not‐for‐profit, critical access hospital in Franklin, NC, serving many of the 33,000 people living in Macon County since 1923. Angel Medical Center’s dedicated staff delivers the highest quality patient care using state‐of‐the‐art technology. As a leader in healthcare, they are committed to providing superior, compassionate care to patients through perpetual improvement and dedication to the community they serve.

As part of its mission to provide superior care to its patients, Angel Medical Center maintains an ongoing effort to invest in the latest technology to continually improve the quality of care and standards at its facilities. The hospital’s network and IT staff support an enormous amount of electronic data from their various systems and healthcare applications and the IT infrastructure must keep up with the data demands of hospital staff and caregivers.

With technology upgrades, improvements in image resolutions that increase file sizes, and a consistent growth in the number of imaging studies done each year, PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications Systems) put new demands on the management of archived images stored on the hospital’s SAN.

Radiology is the largest contributor of information in healthcare. The average size of a medical image is approximately 30MB and that is expected to double over the next few years due to new imaging technologies (3D imaging, Digital Mammography, etc.). Healthcare providers rely on image availability at the point of care to make proper diagnoses. Having archived studies for comparison centrally located and quickly accessible on the network gives caregivers the critical information they need, when they need it, to provide top quality care to their patients. With many different imaging applications (RIS, Cardiology PACS, LIS, OR, Ambulatory, Oncology), image sharing and storage consolidation is key to delivering quality patient care and reducing overall costs.

CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT

The hospital’s HCIS and applications data was being managed by IT staff on a SAN (storage area network) with archive storage on an older optical jukebox with removable WORM (write once read many) media. Their Sectra PACS stored frequently accessed images online and archived images were managed by the NAS File Server at the back end.

After a 30 day period, the online data was being purged to the NAS File Server. The PACS File Server was getting filled up with images accumulated after close to a decade of imaging and the server was slow.

They also had no comprehensive disaster recovery plan other than backups. Any failure would have resulted in some significant downtime. The archived data was all stored at the same location which put critical information at risk of being destroyed in the case of an unexpected disaster.

THE SYMPTOMS

After implementing an EMR (Electronic Medical Record), and consequently archiving more data and images, Angel’s IT staff recognized that there were serious maintenance and reliability issues with their old optical jukebox. It was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain as compared to its functionality and it wasn’t mitigating their regulatory compliance related risks and liabilities. Data retrieval was very slow and sometimes labor intensive if administrators had to locate and pull data from its storage location, upload it and retrieve it.

Upon exploring the benefits of KOMpliance in the context of archiving their records for their Meditech HCIS, Angel’s IT staff realized that they could also replace their existing PACS backend file server with a secure KOMpliance archive to protect and preserve their data and most importantly mitigate risk and data loss.

With the increasing volume of image data that Angel’s Radiology Department was archiving from PACS exams, capacities on the NAS were quickly consumed and becoming arduous to manage. It was imperative that Angel implement an easily scalable storage solution to provide a secure, long‐term repository for archived studies that needed to be retained according to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and MQSA (Mammography Quality Standards Act) requirements, while maintaining a reasonable cost of ownership to meet budgetary constraints.

THE EXAMINATION & DIAGNOSIS

Relying on their aging NAS to meet the ever increasing storage capacity requirements for their Sectra PACS was not cost efficient and did not meet the high availability or long‐term permanence that Angel Medical Center needed to protect and access its archive data and images. The stream of patient images and other critical data being managed by Angel’s storage infrastructure meant that they had to increase their archive storage capacity quickly.

Angel’s IT team was expending valuable IT resources, time and money to apply band‐aid fixes for old technology while still leaving the hospital’s most valuable data at risk. Compounding the situation were concerns about offsite backup and recovery of data in a disaster scenario. A fire, natural disaster, or system failure would prohibit access and could jeopardize the security of the data.

Oversight and accountability demands were also increasing as a result of HIPAA, JCAHO, MQSA and other regulatory requirements, including the HITECH Act. Angel’s IT team realized that choosing a system that offered longevity, security, authenticity, high availability, and scalability was the only choice.

These challenges led them to look for an archive storage solution that would meet multiple goals:

1. 1.  More efficiently and cost‐effectively store, protect and maintain the increasing amounts of data and images resulting from regulatory requirements and changes in technology.
2. 2.  Minimize the risks associated with data loss in an unanticipated disaster.
3. 3.  Be compatible with their existing PACS.

THE TIPPING POINT

Once The Angel IT team reviewed the KOMpliance solution architecture for deployment to replace the obsolete Hewlett‐Packard Jukebox used to archive the records and images for the Meditech archive solution from Hyland Software; they realized that it looked and felt just like other NAS filers that they had deployed in their infrastructure. The key here was that they were already familiar with the Windows NAS filer used to archive the PACS images for the Sectra solution. The Angel team had a great deal of confidence in the capabilities of KOM as a vendor that they trusted and that had always been there to support them in the past.

Taking into consideration all their options, budgetary constraints, and most importantly, KOM Networks’ dedication to customer service and responsive support Angel chose KOMpliance for tamperproof, cost effective archive storage. Since KOM software was already being used as part of a previous integrated solution to archive data from their Meditech HCIS, along with the fact that KOMpliance was based on familiar standard Enterprise Class Servers powered by Windows made this a very compelling proposition. With KOMpliance there was no learning curve. Angel’s IT staff already possessed the administrative talent and knowledge to deploy, use and maintain KOMpliance to meet their regulatory obligations today and well into the future.

“KOMpliance offered a great combination of technology, ease of use, and cost which were very important to us, but what really tipped this transition in favor of KOM was the outstanding level of support we have received from them in the past,” said Gary Hanold, director of information technology at Angel Medical Center. “We believed that it would work and we had confidence that KOM would help us overcome any obstacles.”

THE CURE

Angel Medical Center deployed four KOMpliance archive storage devices. The first one took the place of the obsolete optical jukebox and integrated with the hospital’s HCIS to archive data on high performance hard‐disk based WORM. Two KOMpliance units provide redundancy of the primary archives in a separate location for disaster recovery. The fourth KOMpliance unit integrated with the Sectra PACS and within 26 hours of being deployed, 7.4TB of data was  migrated, averaging 2.2GB per minute.

“KOMpliance was fast and painless,” said Jim Moran, network administrator/HIPAA security officer. “We simply copied the data and then changed IP addresses and everything was up and running in minutes. The system ran faster and the images were accessible at a faster rate than the old infrastructure. The exceptional support we received to overcome an issue with the retention settings and compatibility with the Sectra software was quick and first‐rate and a deciding factor in our plans for storage of other healthcare applications.”

In addition to meeting stringent performance, reliability, scalability, cost, and long‐term retention requirements, KOMpliance is widely used in the healthcare industry because it’s technology agnostic and vendor independent, and so inherently flexible.

“Improving the efficiency of our storage environment and reducing the cost to manage critical data was very important to our organization, but more importantly, we needed to make sure that we were meeting strict compliance requirements for archiving health information and we needed a solution to easily restore information in the event of a disaster”, said Gary Hanold. “In addition, we were also looking for an archive storage solution that would integrate and complement our existing technology investment in Sectra PACS. We needed universal archive storage that was more than just a RAID disk and KOMpliance more than fit‐the‐bill."

While regulatory retention periods for PACS image archive vary by state, North Carolina requires that images for adults be retained for 5‐11 years after the patient’s discharge. For children, images have to be retained until age 21 years. The Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA) requires that mammograms are retained until the next annual image or for at least 10 years if the patient has had no other mammograms at the facility. However, mammography images can be kept longer to assure good quality, or for ongoing comparison of earlier studies. In cases of medical research, historic documentation, clinical trials and ongoing disease treatment, some medical images can be required to be retained indefinitely.

“KOMpliance provides us with functionality that wasn’t available before”, says Lori Smith, director of radiology. “With its automated policy‐based retention, we no longer have to worry about meeting different regulatory requirements for different types of studies or patients. KOMpliance automatically stores and preserves the images for as long as required and then automatically erases the archived image when regulatory compliance is met or retention period is reached, freeing up much needed storage space.”

OUTSTANDING RESULTS

With the introduction of KOMpliance into their storage environment, Angel Medical Center’s IT staff is now confident that their most valuable data is secured, protected, and always available, and that they can meet their future growth needs and compliance obligations using affordable, efficient storage.

Today both clinical and non‐clinical HCIS information, PACS images and associated documentation are still captured and accessed by the users in exactly the same way as before, but now retrieval time has been cut from minutes to seconds.

Angel Medical Center was so pleased with the results they are getting using KOMpliance as storage for their PACS and the five‐star 24/7 support that they get with KOM Networks, that they are now also using KOMpliance as the storage array for additional applications, including Nuclear Medicine and Echocardiograms, that demand large amounts of data storage space, rapid retrieval times, and stringent protection.

Angel Medical Center’s caregivers and hospital staff are now assured that they will have the information necessary to continue to provide the highest quality care and superior services to their patients.

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To learn more about Angel Medical Center, visit them online at http://www.angelmed.org/.

For more information about how KOM Networks can help you implement a comprehensive information lifecycle solution to optimize your existing storage environment, visit them online at www.komnetworks.com or call 1-888-556-6462.