I was browsing today when I came upon an all too brief article that appeared in HealthCare Informatics in August, 2007. The title of Stacey Kramer’s article is A Two-Tier Solution, and the first sentence states that “Memorial Hospital found it takes two vendors to handle imaging properly – one for PACS and one for storage.”
According to the article, Memorial Hospital decided to combine a McKesson PACS with “IBM’s tiered storage solution”. Unfortunately the article provides no real information on the actual configuration, or any explanation as to why this was the ideal combination.
Without any detail, I am left to speculate that this is merely an example of the customer requiring the PACS vendor to substitute the customer’s favorite storage solution for the storage solution originally proposed by the PACS vendor. If this is the case, this is hardly a breakthrough.
If in fact, “IBM’s tiered storage solution” was their GMAS configuration featuring Bycast’s potent Information Lifecycle Management software, that would be a significant upgrade over the typical PACS configuration that features direct attached storage, but once again, hardly a breakthrough.
There is no evidence to suggest that there is a separate data Directory on this separate storage solution, and that the data is in any way being managed independently of the PACS application. Bottom line, the McKesson PACS still controls the study data, and years from now, when Memorial Hospital decides to replace this PACS with another PACS, they will have to migrate all of that study data through the McKesson PACS and through the new PACS, even if this migration is right back to the same IBM storage solution.
Choosing a separate Storage Solution was a good First Step, but the next step would have been to interface the McKesson PACS to a PACS-neutral Archive. There are a number of PACS-neutral Archive software applications that could utilize the same IBM storage solution, but in this case, the study data would be controlled by the PACS-neutral Archive and not the McKesson PACS application. The study data would not have to be migrated downstream, when the McKesson PACS is replaced.
The good news is that it is never to late to build a PACS-neutral Archive, and pro-actively migrate the study data to this archive long before the data migration task gets that much bigger and much more expensive.
I have written several White Papers on the subject of Pro-active Data Migration and PACS-neutral Archives. The papers are too lengthy to publish on this web site, but they are freely available to anyone forwarding an email request.