Electronic Medical Records and Image Retention

The TeraStack^® Solution provides any medical facility a secure and reliable way to store data, electronic medical records, and images. Various types of medical records are being saved for the patient's lifetime. These include but are not limited to general medical data storage, 3D images, MRIs, CAT Scans, X-rays, ECGs and patient test data. This type of data is getting larger in size and becoming more of a problem to store given current resources and capabilities. Long-term retention of this data is crucial to the care given to anyone requiring medical assistance as technologies and advancements in medicine are discovered in the future years to come.

Another problem with the ever expanding amount of data is the security and privacy issues that go along with managing this information for long periods of time. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that patient data be permanently stored in a retrievable manner. Because electronic medical records must be kept for the lifetime of a patient, Hie Electronics provides the TeraStack^® Solution which uses Blu-ray technology to allow for this patient data to be kept for decades on a non-volatile media in a secure manner utilizing the latest technology. With every technological advance, additional data storage will be required and the TeraStack^® Solution addresses that need as a scalable data storage solution. The TBYTe^® provides an enterprise application server with up to 42 terabytes (TB) of online data storage and up to eight hot-swappable 6.25TB optical volumes for up to 50 terabytes (TB) of nearline data storage. The TBYTe^® utilizes Active Archive^™ hierarchical storage management providing online, nearline, and offline data storage capabilities in one solution.

The online capability is managed with an energy efficient multi-core enterprise application server with a significant RAID cache for PACS application support during peak processing periods. Using scheduled rehydration of older data can provide users with instant access to nearline data. When customers require a buffer larger than 42TB, the TBYTe^® can be connected directly to a SAN managed by our hierarchical storage management software.

Medical data availability and integrity is a primary concern for the storage of virtually all long-term data. IT administrators have had to deal with data migration to new storage media or new systems altogether because of the relatively short lifespan of those storage technologies. Hard drives have an approximate 3-5 year useful lifecycle and tape follows closely with 5-7 years of useable lifetime. The recurring shuffle of hard drives and magnetic tapes is now an issue of the past for the long term preservation of data with high-density Blu-ray optical media. The short lifetimes of tape and hard drive media, due in part to their mechanical and magnetic nature, have resulted in the use of redundant backup practices to compensate for their shortfall requiring extra media, management, space, and energy. Blu-ray optical media data integrity is manufacturer rated for up to 100 years for write-once media and over 50 years for rewritable media. Blu-ray media is extremely resilient and guards data against harm from temperature fluctuations, moisture, water damage, power interruption or spiking, magnetic variations, critical system failures and aging.

Hie Electronics, Inc. offers the TeraStack^® Solution TBYTe 8.6.6, TBYTe 8.14.28, and the TBYTe 8.14.42 multi-tiered storage and application processing platforms providing a "data center in box" approach to critical data backup that can help alleviate many of the space, power, and cost limitations associated with today's storage environments. Whether a data storage technology refresh is necessary or some efficiency improvements need to be made, the TeraStack^® Solution provides a turn-key system that can help solve many of the problems associated with today's storage issues dealing with electronic medical records and image retention.