BridgeHeadJoins European Centre of Expertise for the Health Care Industry

BridgeHead Software Ltd
announced that it has joined forces with the European
Centre of Expertise for the Health Care Industry EEIG to provide a data and
storage management offering to European healthcare organisations known as the
Shared Medical Archiving Solution (SMAS).

SMAS is a managed, cloud-based, archiving solution for all data – clinical and
administrative – is independently audited by KPMG
International Cooperative, providing healthcare organisations an added
level of assurance that where their data resides is not only compliant, but
will remain secure.

A number of factors make this solution innovative for the
healthcare industry. Firstly, unlike other offerings, SMAS enables hospitals to
store, protect and share both the clinical and administrative data originating
from disparate applications.

Whether DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) images from
radiology departments or scanned patient information, through to email or
general file data such as documents and spreadsheets, the joint solution is
equipped to manage the lifecycle of data within a hospital.

Secondly, SMAS will be audited and certified by KPMG, as
opposed to the more traditional approach of separately certifying only the
individual elements. As a result, hospitals will not have to concern themselves
with the regulatory and compliance issues normally associated with outsourcing
the management of their data and can be confident that their information will
remain secure.

Within the overall offering, BridgeHead’s Healthcare Data Management (HDM)
Solution plays the role of managing the data between a hospital’s applications
and the hardware on which the data is stored. As content is moved into the
archive, the data is indexed (both meta-data and full-text indexing), making it
easy for hospital staff to search for and access information, such as patient
records, as and when needed. Data footprints within the archive can also be
reduced through compression functionality in accordance with hospital policies.

In addition, this offering can be used by healthcare organisations to
facilitate a DR solution by using the cloud-based archive as a secondary
data centre to house copies of a hospital’s data in the event of a disaster,
outage, corruption or loss.

Klaus Aulenbacher, CEO of European Centre of Expertise for the Healthcare
Industry EEIG, commented: "By
bringing together best-of-breed providers of technology and services, such as
BridgeHead Software and KPMG, we are able to offer hospitals a unique,
comprehensive solution to effectively manage and protect all of their data,
whether for the purposes of deep archive and/or as a DR solution. And, by fully
auditing and certifying the solution, handling all of the legal and regulatory
requirements necessary when outsourcing healthcare data, it dramatically
reduces risk to customers and provides peace of mind. We are delighted to be
working with BridgeHead Software in leveraging their Healthcare Data Management
technology as part of this solution."

Jim Beagle, CEO and president at BridgeHead Software, added: "It’s great to be part of such a forward
thinking initiative. Hospitals are increasingly battling with the challenges of
managing their ever-growing healthcare data. Solutions, such as SMAS, provide a
real alternative to the more traditional, in-house data management approaches,
which can be costly, time consuming and resource intensive. We’re delighted to
work with such an innovative organisation such as the European Centre of Expertise
for the Health Care Industry EEIG and look forward to helping them extend their
offerings across Europe."

Following beta trials in Germany and Austria, the cloud-based
archiving solution is now being rolled out across Europe.