Business issues
NYU Medical Center took action to ensure compliance with HIPAA data retention requirements due to take effect in April 2005. Additionally, the Medical Center deployed a picture archiving communications system (PACS) to better serve patients. In order to capture greater operational efficiencies and care-enhancing performance for its PACS while meeting its regulatory obligations, the customer required a hearty storage infrastructure.

Solutions
NYU Medical Center adopted the StorageTek information lifecycle management (ILM) storage infrastructure solution to leverage better performance from its PACS application. NYU uses the BladeStore disk subsystem as a tier 2 host, holding data migrated from primary disk. Data backup copies are written to a tier 3 StorageTek L700e tape library. To manage more than 20 TBs of image data the medical center uses StorageTek’s Application Storage Manager (ASM) software application.

Financial benefits
The Medical Center consolidated several discrete departmental infrastructures down to one enterprise-wide PACS network to yield a centralized infrastructure. This architecture is much less expensive to operate, maintain and administer.

Business benefits
ASM supports the Medical Center’s policy-based patient data management processes to meet its primary goal of complying with HIPAA information retention regulations. Moreover, the customer was able to institute a centralized, enterprise-wide storage services utility model. This powers a Web-based access interface to boost practitioner collaboration on patient cases by enabling access from anywhere.

Technology benefits
The most significant technological benefit was a stark increase in the speed that patient images can be retrieved by doctors. Previously, the legacy jukebox solution might take several hours before it would be loaded by hand with a cartridge hosting the patient’s digital exam. Today, the StorageTek BladeStore and tape library solutions can push that same image exam to physicians in minutes at most.