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Jim Barbaglia, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, ValleyBaptist Health System, said, "We pride ourselves on being patient-centric, sowe need to have access to a patient's electronic health record information atall times. With EMC managing and protecting all of our medical and businessinformation, we have the technology to deliver high level care around theclock. And, as this information ages, we move it automatically to morecost-effective storage to help lower our operational costs and increase thevalue of our investments."
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Previously, the 800-plus bed healthcare provider kept radiology images --such as X-rays, mammograms and sonograms -- on films and stored other patientand medical information on an HP storage device. Using FUJIFILM MedicalSystem's Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS), Valley Baptist nowdigitizes the radiology images for storing on EMC CLARiiON(R) systems and usesEMC DiskXtender(TM) software to automatically archive images from CLARiiON toEMC Centera(R) content-addressed storage after 12 months as defined byclinical protocol. The Valley Baptist Health cardiology department has adoptedthis same approach to manage cardiology images using the GE HealthcareCentricity CV PACS also integrated with CLARiiON and Centera.
"It's vastly more efficient and reliable to store our radiology andcardiology images on EMC," said Joey Govea, PACS Administrator. "With the oldsystem, the films could be easily lost, damaged or take 30 minutes to a fullhour to retrieve. Now, access is instantaneous enabling our radiologists andcardiologists to review more procedures per workday. We're also saving $28,000per month on film and that doesn't include the cost of people who process,retrieve and deliver the film, accelerating our ROI."
Valley Baptist Medical Center-Brownsville, one of the hospitals that ispart of the Texas-based health system, worked with EMC to implement itsinformation infrastructure, which embraces policy-based solutions toautomatically move historic data to lower-cost storage systems. As part ofthis strategy, Valley Baptist stores information from critical applicationssuch as PACS, time and attendance, finance, PeopleSoft and Microsoft Exchangeon a CLARiiON storage area network (SAN). Valley Baptist also uses Centera forstoring medical power of attorney, advanced medical directives, insurancedocumentation and billing information. By deploying a tiered storage strategy,Valley Baptist Health efficiently and reliably manage its informationretention policies to meet Protected Health Information (PHI) regulations.
"We realized 98 percent of our physicians make comparisons -- such as theprogress of tumor growth or shrinkage -- in the first several months from whenthe images are first captured," said Ignacio Silva Director of IT operations."Because of this care protocol, we store our medical images on the EMCCLARiiON for a year. This enables us to make better use of the highperformance SAN. After this period, medical images are automatically migratedwith EMC DiskXtender to EMC Centera for long-term archiving. This approachimproves our SAN performance and speeds backup processes."
Valley Baptist Health also uses numerous software tools -- such as EMCMirrorView(TM), EMC Replication Manager, EMC SnapView(R) and EMC PowerPath(R)-- to replicate information to a second data center for business continuityand to maximize the availability of vital patient information stored on the100-terabyte EMC information infrastructure. Additionally, this softwareenabl
