In a news piece released today on auntminnie.com, it appears that PACS vendor Carestream Health and storage vendor Hitachi Data Systems have entered into a collaborative agreement to create a clinical information archive. The collaboration will combine Carestream’s Versatile Intelligent Patient Archive (VIParchive) and the newly enhanced Hitachi Content Archive Platform into a single footprint.
This means that three of the top storage solution vendors (Hitachi, HP, and IBM) now have “partnerships” that add the all-important DICOM layer to an otherwise basic storage solution. This latest Carestream/Hitachi storage solution will enable multiple application servers (Radiology PACS, Cardiology PACS) from different vendors to share a common storage solution.
Unlike the DeJarnette/HP and Acuo Technologies/IBM combo systems, this new Carestream/Hitachi entry does not appear capable of modifying the DICOM file formats to accommodate differences between the vendor’s use of the DICOM header. In this case the archive stores exactly what it is given and returns the same. If the requesting application server does not know how to interpret the DICOM header created by another vendor’s server, too bad! Both the DeJarnette and Acuo software packages are capable of DICOM Tag Morphing, which effectively translates one vendor’s DICOM header format into the other’s.
The PACS vendor Emageon is also marketing an Enterprise Content Manager (archive) that is capable of Tag Morphing to accommodate any differences that may exist between the way two vendors store metadata in the DICOM header. A plus for the Emageon approach is the fact that their ECM software is hardware agnostic and can be hosted by a variety of platforms and is validated with a variety of storage solutions.
Is the Carestream/Hitachi agreement an indication that the storage wars are taking a new turn?