Nirvanix and Acuo Deliver HIPAA Compliant Cloud Storage Service

Nirvanix, Inc. announced that Acuo Technologies, LLC, in software for intelligent medical image lifecycle management, has integrated the latest version of its Universal Clinical Platform (UCP3) software with Nirvanix public, hybrid and private cloud storage services.

The combination delivers a HIPAA-compliant, enterprise-grade cloud storage service that enables healthcare organizations to consolidate diverse department-specific PACS into a unified and secure cloud environment for on-demand storage, availability and bandwidth resources with usage-based pricing.

"Cloud storage is disrupting virtually every industry and healthcare is especially ripe for change," said Dave Vellante, president and co-founder of Wikibon.org, a leading IT think tank. "A ‘pay on image ingest’ model supports the vision of a ‘Healthcare Cloud’ by eliminating large CapEx-intensive acquisitions such as physical storage and replication licenses. Healthcare organizations require continuous data access to medical images at multiple geographic locations without complicated failover scenarios common in many conventional RAID storage deployments."

The combined Nirvanix-Acuo offering has already been selected by a healthcare organization with over half a petabyte of unstructured data currently being uploaded to the cloud.

Nirvanix cloud storage services are suited for the healthcare sector as they were designed from the onset to store and protect massive unstructured content files ranging from PACS to patient records and hundreds of years of HD video. The ability to index and tag images makes it easy for healthcare organizations to retrieve data that is many years old, a criticality for HIPAA compliance. Built-in data consistency software ensures that once a change is made to a medical file stored in the cloud, it’s reflected across the entire cloud instantaneously-not during a ‘consistency window’ or a future point in time-which is critical when dealing with patient data prior to surgery and during emergency care.

"Access to medical images is critical for patient diagnosis and treatment. However, we find that many healthcare providers have siloed PACS systems, increasing license and storage costs and making medical images hard to access and share across the enterprise and the healthcare system in general," said Shannon M. Werb, COO and chief strategy officer of Acuo Technologies. "The integration of Acuo UCP3 software with Nirvanix cloud storage services gives customers a unified, shareable medical image archive and instant access to the economies of the cloud. By making images easier to access and manage and supporting a collaborative workflow across the globe, our companies can transform patient care."

The Universal Clinical Platform is a service-oriented Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solution that provides end-to-end lifecycle management of medical images. The latest version of UCP3 incorporates features required for next generation VNA solutions with standard-based clinical registry and repository capabilities, infrastructure versatility, performance and scalability, and workflow.

"The integration of Acuo Technologies UCP3 software with Nirvanix cloud storage services provides us with a significant opportunity to address the rapid growth facing the healthcare market as it shifts to the cloud," said Scott Genereux, president and CEO of Nirvanix. "We’re adding a new value dimension for healthcare providers-savings from reduced redundancy in PACS software licenses and pay-by-the-drink storage resources-while they gain from ease-of-access, content management, and workflow capabilities. All of which translates into superior patient care and leads to successful outcomes."

The Nirvanix Cloud File System enables X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans to be presented as one large global namespace, accessible from any location. The system is designed for millions of users and billions of files-more than enough to store 200 million images and scanned records from a single healthcare provider, while supporting data ingest rates of up to 10TB per day, per customer.

Nirvanix cloud storage services protect and secure personally identifiable healthcare information (PIHI), ensuring that all files stored in the cloud are obscurificated as software de-identifies each physical file, removing the file name, owner and type.

Combined with military-grade, security at the user, data storage and physical data center levels, Nirvanix and Acuo are enabling secure access, content management, and collaborative workflows throughout the healthcare delivery system.