Valley Baptist Health System Replaces Fujifilm and HP by EMC

EMC Corporation announced that Valley Baptist Health System has embraced an information infrastructure to quickly and cost-effectively access patients’ medical histories, legal and financial information, and other records critical to providing quality patient care.
Jim Barbaglia, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Valley Baptist Health System, said: "We pride ourselves on being patient-centric, so we need to have access to a patient’s electronic health record information at all times. With EMC managing and protecting all of our medical and business information, we have the technology to deliver high level care around the clock. And, as this information ages, we move it automatically to more cost-effective storage to help lower our operational costs and increase the value of our investments."

Previously, the 800-plus bed healthcare provider kept radiology images — such as X-rays, mammograms and sonograms — on films and stored other patient and medical information on an HP storage device. Using FUJIFILM Medical System’s Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS), Valley Baptist now digitizes the radiology images for storing on EMC CLARiiON systems and uses EMC DiskXtender software to automatically archive images from CLARiiON to EMC Centera content-addressed storage after 12 months as defined by clinical protocol. The Valley Baptist Health cardiology department has adopted this same approach to manage cardiology images using the GE Healthcare Centricity CV PACS also integrated with CLARiiON and Centera.

"It’s vastly more efficient and reliable to store our radiology and cardiology images on EMC," said Joey Govea, PACS Administrator. "With the old system, the films could be easily lost, damaged or take 30 minutes to a full hour to retrieve. Now, access is instantaneous enabling our radiologists and cardiologists to review more procedures per workday. We’re also saving $28,000 per month on film and that doesn’t include the cost of people who process, retrieve and deliver the film, accelerating our ROI."

Valley Baptist Medical Center-Brownsville, one of the hospitals that is part of the Texas-based health system, worked with EMC to implement its information infrastructure, which embraces policy-based solutions to automatically move historic data to lower-cost storage systems. As part of this strategy, Valley Baptist stores information from critical applications such as PACS, time and attendance, finance, PeopleSoft and Microsoft Exchange on a CLARiiON storage area network (SAN). Valley Baptist also uses Centera for storing medical power of attorney, advanced medical directives, insurance documentation and billing information. By deploying a tiered storage strategy, Valley Baptist Health efficiently and reliably manage its information retention policies to meet Protected Health Information (PHI) regulations.

"We realized 98 percent of our physicians make comparisons — such as the progress of tumor growth or shrinkage — in the first several months from when the images are first captured," said Ignacio Silva Director of IT operations. "Because of this care protocol, we store our medical images on the EMC CLARiiON for a year. This enables us to make better use of the high performance SAN. After this period, medical images are automatically migrated with EMC DiskXtender to EMC Centera for long-term archiving. This approach improves our SAN performance and speeds backup processes."

Valley Baptist Health also uses numerous software tools — such as EMC MirrorView, EMC Replication Manager, EMC SnapView and EMC PowerPath — to replicate information to a second data center for business continuity and to maximize the availability of vital patient information stored on the 100-terabyte EMC information infrastructure. Additionally, this software enables the healthcare provider to reduce the time it takes to perform application and operating system upgrades.

"EMC provides the reliability in systems and services we need to deliver the highest quality patient care," said Silva. "The software tools are easier to use and the system is more robust than what we had before."