Isala Clinics Signed With Proact and GE Healthcare

Isala Clinics in Zwolle has just signed an agreement with Proact Group and GE Healthcare to outsource management of PACS archive data on an On-Demand basis via Proact’s Managed Cloud Services.

This agreement has secured a scalable solution for Isala Clinics for the coming five years which allows them to make one payment based on archived research, by capacity usage and SLA.

Isala Clinics in Zwolle is the largest non-academic teaching hospital in the Netherlands. Owing to an increase in methods in the departments of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine there was a rise in the number of examinations, accompanied by the issue of the vastly increased image data that a method produces. For instance CT scanners are now highly-advanced in comparison to before and can scan in far more detail. All these data must be stored in the PACS archive. The PACS archive that is being replaced will be consulted increasingly as a result of this development and will therefore be put to the test for its performance and the limit of its potential expansion.

"Following a careful selection process we opted for the concept of Proact and GE Healthcare. The scalable archive solution, the forecast performance and the price/performance ratio were important issues," says Wim Huurnink, Coordinator PACS Radiology Isala Clinics.

The archiving solution of GE Healthcare will be installed at the location of the Isala Clinics in two data centres and is available and secure in the two locations both at storage and at server level. Proact handles replication between these two data centres and is also in charge of the daily management of the archive environment and the availability of the archive in accordance with the SLA. This means that Isala Clinics is always protected by a management contract.

Receiving services on the basis of Managed Cloud Services offers the hospital flexibility and scalability as regards its archiving solution. Instead of investing in its own hardware Isala Clinics will receive managed services with availability guarantees.

"By using the Proact archive we in the Isala Clinics don’t have to deal with the capacity and technology of the Dicom archive," says Wim Kortekaas, Team Leader Central Infrastructure Isala ICT.

A feature of this solution is that all the services are procured on a ‘pay per use’ basis. With set and foreseeable monthly costs the hospital can keep control of its budget. This cooperation relieves Isala Clinics of any work relating to PACS archiving.

Lucas den Os, Managing Director Proact Benelux, is pleased with the agreement: "Proact and GE Healthcare are finding an increasing demand for performance and functionality-based agreements. In our vision the delivery of a PACS archive is therefore no longer about separately supplying hardware, software and services but a delivery of guarantees based on a Service Level Agreement. It is great to find that a major hospital such as the Isala Clinics has chosen to purchase a PACS archive based on utility."