InSiteOne secures French archiving connection

InSiteOne has joined forces with the French firm Digital Share and France Telecom to launch the first digital healthcare archiving service in Europe. Using InSiteOne’s InDex digital archive service in conjunction with Digital Share’s clinical portal, physicians will be able to access diagnostic images from any location. The service will be delivered over France Telecom’s existing national data network.

“Healthcare professionals worldwide are grappling with the common themes of digital data management and storage, combined with the need to find more efficient and faster ways to put clinical information into the hands of the end user,” said Rick Friswell, chair and CEO of InSiteOne. “Particularly in Europe, the broad acceptance of technological solutions for medical data management, as well as the creation of public/private partnerships, means that we can integrate our InDex service into the electronic patient record, providing a total solution within any healthcare delivery network.”

InSiteOne is a provider of secure online and nearline digital image storage and archiving services throughout the U.S. Digital Share was established to create and market a healthcare portal that will provide physicians with real-time access to clinical patient information. Developed in conjunction with Viador, a U.S. company, and France Telecom, the portal application will use the patient’s record—including DICOM images—to help physicians solve medical problems and improve the delivery of emergency care.

The portal is designed to deliver a secure personalized access point where each doctor can gain instantaneous access to all of the patient’s medical records, including text, images, audio, and video, even if the records come from different medical centers and physician practices in the region. Using the portal, physicians can search, access, and distribute medical information from any information source, including databases, documents, and the Web. Doctors will link to this database through a secure extranet connection and use smart cards for authentication.

Digital Share originally intended to take a regional approach throughout France with its portal-based service, according to CEO Miguel Grollet. By partnering with InSiteOne, the company has expanded its capabilities and is looking to become one of the first clinical content providers to serve the European healthcare market.

“With the addition of the InSiteOne archive service, we now have a critical part of the total architecture of the portal completed,” Grollet said.

Beta testing of the InSiteOne/Digital Share total clinical solution is already under way in selected western European markets, with general availability of the portal application scheduled for the second half of this year.