Electronic Medical Records and Image Retention
The TeraStack® Solution provides any medical facility a secure and reliable way to store the growing data needs for today's electronic medical records and image retention requirements. It is vital for any doctor, nurse, or technician to have quick 
and seamless access to this type of patient data.
Various types of medical records are being saved for lifetimes of patients. 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 vast amounts of 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 stored one time and kept for decades on a non-volatile media in a secure manner utilizing the latest Blu-ray data storage 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 28 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® is a scalable data storage solution utilizing hierarchical storage management providing online, nearline, and offline data storage capabilities in one solution.
Medical professionals need this important information very quickly to enable them to compare present information with some that might be decades old. Hierarchical Storage Management software integrated with PACS data backup and archives are essential to the success of capabilities needed. This online capability is managed with an energy efficient multi-core enterprise application server with significant RAID cache for PACS application support and during peak processing periods. This instant access can still be achieved with nearline patient data saved to Blu-ray with integration into the existing scheduling database which rehydrates older, "sleeping data" back into the online tier. When customer requirements require a buffer larger than 28TB, the TBYTe® can be connected directly to an existing SAN still managed by our hierarchical storage management software.
Medical data availability and integrity is of paramount concern for the storage of virtually all long term data. IT administrators have long had to deal with the migration of data to new storage media technologies 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 the introduction of high-density Blu-ray optical media and the TeraStack® Solution. 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.
Hie Electronics, Inc. offers the TeraStack® Solution TBYTe 8.6.6 and the TBYTe 8.14.28 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.
