HOPKINTON, Mass. -- EMC Corporation today announced that CHRISTUS Health, the sixth-largest Catholic healthcare system in the country, has deployed EMC networked storage, software and services to enable information lifecycle management (ILM) across its 40-hospital network. Consequently, CHRISTUS Health is dramatically decreasing the time it takes clinicians to access critical medical images, lowered the cost of managing its growing IT infrastructure and delivered dramatic improvements in patient care.
George Conklin, CHRISTUS' Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, said, "Managing information about our patients from the time they enter our organization to when they leave is critical to providing the best point of care service in the most efficient way. EMC's expertise, software and multi-tiered storage infrastructure ensures our clinicians access to the most important information at anytime regardless of if they are in the doctor's office or operating room."
Conklin added, "Not every piece of patient information is needed all the time, so we need solutions that prioritize the access and storage of that data. ILM will enable us to move older information to less expensive storage that provides rapid and reliable access, but costs less to acquire and manage. Already, we reduced the time it takes to deliver critical patient information to the point of care from 20 minutes to less than a minute. Our costs of generating medical images have been reduced by 25 percent. Our return on investment for PACS storage was realized in just three years -- two years earlier than our original projections."
With EMC Information Consulting Services' (ISC) ILM and business continuity services, CHRISTUS is deploying a range of EMC storage solutions to deliver varying levels of availability, connectivity and performance across the healthcare network. EMC software, including EMC DiskXtender(R) and EMC ControlCenter(TM), allows CHRISTUS to automatically move information across multiple tiers of storage, as well as centrally and cost-efficiently manage and protect a diverse and distributed IT infrastructure.
Conklin said. "We store our active medical images on EMC systems at the regional sites near the point of care for fastest possible access by clinicians. Once a month, we archive the images to a lower-cost EMC storage tier at our primary sites, which further lowers our storage costs and also helps us fully comply with HIPAA and relevant Sarbanes-Oxley regulations."
At seven regional data centers, EMC CLARiiON(R) CX networked storage and EMC NetWin(TM) network-attached storage (NAS) keep MRIs, X-rays, sonograms and other images generated by CHRISTUS' McKesson and Agfa PACS (Picture Archiving Communications System) applications. CHRISTUS archives images stored on CLARiiON and NetWin to EMC Centera(TM) content-addressed storage (CAS). EMC Symmetrix(R) DMX(TM) located at CHRISTUS' primary data center is a central repository for a Meditech Health Information System (HIS) application. CHRISTUS also uses EMC Celerra(TM) NAS to provide file-sharing for MediTech HIS, admissions, accounting, pharmacy order management and other applications.
"In the spirit of ILM, our tiered protection strategy delivers even more targeted availability at the best price point," said Conklin. "EMC software helps us facilitate tape backups at the regional and primary sites. We also rely on EMC replication software to mirror archived data stored on Centera between two primary sites located 200 miles apart, and in the future, will extend that replication to our high-end Symmetrix tier as well."
"Our healthcare network has been growing at a rapid clip as we add new centers, enter new states and expand our facilities. We've increased our storage capacity to more than 200 terabytes and added new IT services without any increase to our IT staff. We project our storage capacity requirements will continue to grow at 20 percent annually over the next five years. EMC solutions are infinitely scalable and can be customized to just about any potential configuration. As our needs grow, we can grow our ILM infrastructure along with us."
About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.emc.com/.
EMC, Symmetrix, CLARiiON, SRDF, TimeFinder, Navisphere, PowerPath, and ResourcePak are registered trademarks, and NetWin, Centera, ControlCenter, Access Logix, SnapView, and InfoMover are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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