Regional West Medical Center Deploys Nexsan Assureon

Nexsan Corporation announced
that Regional West Medical Center1 of
Scottsbluff, Nebraska, has deployed the Nexsan Assureon to
improve the reliability and recall performance of its medical archive system
and to institute a solid business continuance and disaster recovery plan.

The
Nexsan Assureon supports a picture archiving and communication system (PACS),
Horizon Medical Imaging from McKesson,
which the medical center purchased to improve the workflow and retention of
patient records.

The McKesson PACS provided benefits, but its
potential was limited by the medical center’s legacy storage infrastructure
which supported it. To treat patients effectively, Regional West’s staff needed
immediate access to all medical records, regardless of age. While accessing
data from the existing NAS
solution was sufficient, the limited performance of the tape-based archive was
a detriment to the entire workflow. Requests were carried to a specialist who
had to research the index to identify and find the correct tape and then mount
it into the library. Restoring a record took anywhere from 24 to 48 hours, and
if problems occurred, the nearest support center was eight hours away. The
limited performance of the library not only increased operational cost, but
also inflated the dependence for maintaining records on primary and secondary
tiers.

Additionally, the operational complexity of tape was
jeopardizing the facilities’ confidence in the ability to record new studies.
Maintaining free space on primary storage is vital to reporting new studies and
efficient storage utilization requires older studies be flushed to secondary NAS when a high watermark is reached. However,
the vulnerabilities of NAS require records be confirmed as archived before
primary data can be flushed. Over time, the unpredictable performance of their outdated
solution was risking the facilities’ ability to write new records.

Regional West Medical Center needed a long-term image
archive that would optimize the PACS’ retrieval speeds, data protection and
workflow. The healthcare facility also needed to mitigate operational costs
caused by an increasing dependency on primary and secondary storage tiers.
Finally, the facility desired a configuration which provided full off-site data
replication to improve its contingency plan for DR and BC. With the tape library, offsite storage of records was dependent on
the physical rotation of media. This process was unreliable, risky, and
required significant management resources.

Improved Data Protection & Availability
After considering several alternatives, Regional West
Medical Center selected the Assureon Medical Image Archive, from Nexsan, to
address the performance, reliability and offsite replication necessities
described above. With Assureon, the facility has eliminated the lengthy recall
for older studies and also reduced the operational costs for
acquiring, protecting and storing offsite data. Additionally, the self-healing
and self-managing functionality of Assureon has provided gains in
productivity by reducing the overhead required to confirm effective long-term
protection of patient records.

These capabilities are further outlined below:

• Data Protection: Assureon’s recurring audits preserve the
  original study, while access authentication and auditing ensures only
  authorized users can view data.
• Ease-of-Use: Assureon is a self-managing and
  self-healing solution that reduces the burden on IT. Remote site
  replication, failover and DR are included with no extra fees and create a
  more efficient contingency plan.
• Efficiency: Offloading primary and secondary storage frees
  up space for active data and reduces the burden of managing these systems. The
  power and cooling costs are also reduced using Nexsan’s AutoMAID disk spin down
  technology.
• Enterprise Performance and Scalability: As an online
  image archive, recalling patient data is reduced from hours to minutes. Furthermore, Assureon is easily expanded and adapts to the evolving demands of
  healthcare facilities.

Feedback from McKesson PACS end users such as radiologists
and technologists has been positive, especially regarding the speed of
image recall from Assureon. The medical center’s IT and PACS administrators
were also surprised by the easy implementation and support for existing
workflow.

"The simplicity
to integrate Assureon’s powerful data protection elements without custom
development or complex integration was another big plus," said Donna
Vogel, IS Data Services Manager, Regional West Medical Center. "In most cases, administrators can’t tell
when a record is being pulled from Assureon as opposed to the primary storage
system, and the system improved our staff efficiency by keeping all data
‘near-line’ for quick retrieval. In addition, we particularly like Assureon’s
ability to provide a very responsive DR solution."