AT&T Selects Acuo Technologies

AT&T, Inc. and Acuo Technologies, provider of software solutions to the medical imaging industry for archiving, collaboration and migration services, announced a strategic alliance to develop vendor-neutral, cloud-based medical imaging storage solutions for healthcare providers and suppliers. Acuo is the latest technology ally to join the AT&T ForHealth portfolio of mHealth, cloud-based, and telehealth products and solutions.

Hospitals and providers are facing the risk of capacity shortage to securely store and share patient medical images and information. Many of the disparate, proprietary vendor systems in place today that manage and store images will only become more taxed as the population ages and imaging volumes and sizes increase. According to Frost & Sullivan, the number of medical imaging procedures is projected to reach the 1 billion mark next year.

IDC Health Insight’s U.S. Health Industry Provider 2011 Top 10 Predictions report foresees the use of cloud storage for medical image archive data as providers begin to implement vendor-neutral archives. Balanced against this growth is the need to share medical images outside the hospital’s systems with referring physicians and other facilities.

Under the new agreement, AT&T plans to utilize Acuo Technologies Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) Services Grid, combined with AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, to create a cloud-based offering for storing, accessing and sharing medical images. The solution will feature a vendor-neutral platform that supports disparate picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go model, avoiding costly capital investment in storage infrastructure.

"Medical image management is one of the biggest challenges in healthcare today, as the amount of storage required will only increase in the coming years," said Randall Porter, assistant vice president, AT&T ForHealth Solutions. "We look forward to working closely with Acuo to enable access, viewing and storage of any medical image for any patient at virtually any time. As with AT&T Healthcare Community Online, our cloud-based health information exchange offer, AT&T brings scale to our cloud-based solution for medical imaging that is unsurpassed in healthcare today."

"Cloud is a natural solution for managing medical images, as the pay-as-you-go model is a very attractive cost model for today’s healthcare IT consumer," said Jeff Timbrook, CEO of Acuo Technologies. "We are thrilled to work with AT&T, and healthcare customers will benefit from the latest generation of vendor-neutral storage systems. AT&T’s proven expertise in highly secure cloud storage will quickly become a leading offering to manage medical images."

Today’s news follows the AT&T ForHealth November announcement in which AT&T announced that it is developing a new set of cloud-based, medical image archive services and security services that will give healthcare providers highly secure access to clinical data in real time, scaled to handle the huge bandwidth demands driven by live video, images and medical records.

AT&T and Acuo will demonstrate their capabilities at the HIMSS11 conference Feb. 20-24, in Orlando.