Firm hopes to help users move to PACSHealthcare institutions contemplating a conversion to digital image management face the difficult challenge of how to handle the storage component of PACS. Maintaining a long-term archive represents a
Firm hopes to help users move to PACS
Healthcare institutions contemplating a conversion to digital image management face the difficult challenge of how to handle the storage component of PACS. Maintaining a long-term archive represents a considerable investment, and with storage technology evolving at a high rate, obsolescence is a definite risk.
Such a technology dynamic cant help but create opportunities, so its not surprising that a company has decided to offer an archiving outsource service to hospitals. Wam!Net Medical, the medical division of digital file delivery firm Wam!Net, is beta testing a digital image archiving service that will allow DICOM-compatible workstations to push images ready for the long-term archive through a Wam!Net wide-area network to off-site storage facilities maintained by the company.
The Minneapolis firm believes that its digital image archiving service can reduce the capital investment required for PACS by as much as 25% to 40%. A dedicated sales force has been set up to market Wam!Nets offerings directly to end users, although the company is also interested in securing OEM relationships with PACS firms, said Gary Jader, vice president and general manager of Wam!Net Medical.
Wam!Net storage facilities, which employ redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID), are ready in Minneapolis and Las Vegas, with another facility planned for Brussels, Belgium. Storage will be replicated among the sites, providing for redundancy and fault tolerance, according to the company. When needed, images can be accessed from workstations at participating hospitals, said Mark Hunter, director of marketing. Wam!Net has partnered on the project with Canadian PACS software developer Mitra Imaging, which is working with Wam!Net to develop workstation work-flow tools to support transmission and retrieval of images.
Wam!Net services are charged on a per-image fee. Customers would not need to purchase any hardware, and the company would install a network access device (NAD). The NAD serves as the link between a hospitals local-area network and the wide-area network, and functions as a staging area for transmission and reception of DICOM data.
Medical image storage services for U.S. customers will be available by the end of the second quarter or early third quarter, Hunter said. The company hopes to have European services ready early next year and Japanese services later in the year.
Testing of both Wam!Nets digital storage system and the transport system that brings the image to the archive is being conducted at Waukesha Memorial Hospital in Waukesha, WI. The digital transport service was introduced in February, and is available for transmission of both radiology and cardiology images, according to the company. In addition to serving as the transmission medium for the storage offering, the transport service will be marketed as a stand-alone service for healthcare institutions that are interested in transmitting medical images to other facilities, but want to avoid tying up WAN bandwidth with large image files, Hunter said.
Hospital information systems networks today arent set up to handle radiology images, he said. With the digital transport service, we can bring in a network that can handle the heavy lifting of these images and keep the large weights off their network bandwidth.
Founded in 1994, Wam!Net focused initially on the graphic arts marketplace, where it has provided electronic delivery services for companies such as Time Inc., JC Penney, Walt Disney, and Macys. Believing its experience in providing digital transport services would translate well to the healthcare market, Wam!Net decided to launch a medical division in November, and introduced Wam!Net Medical to the imaging marketplace at last years RSNA meeting.
While Wam!Net may not be well known in healthcare, the company does enjoy the backing of a few large companies, including telecommunications giant MCI WorldCom of Jackson, MS, and workstation developer SGI of Mountain View, CA. SGI has been designated Wam!Nets preferred provider of computing systems and related services for the next four years. In addition, SGI has rights to co-market Wam!Net managed data services to certain markets, including healthcare.
Can MRI-Based AI Enhance Pre-Op Prediction of Tumor Deposits in Patients with Rectal Cancer?
October 31st 2024For patients with rectal cancer, an emerging nomogram that combines deep learning and clinical factors had greater than 16 percent and 23 percent increases in accuracy and specificity, respectively, for pre-op prediction of tumor deposits in comparison to clinical factors alone.
Artifact Reduction Drives Technology Advances with Updated Version of Echelon Synergy MRI System
October 30th 2024Emerging technologies included with the 10th version of the 1.5T MRI platform include Synergy DLR Clear and Synergy Vision that are geared toward mitigating common challenges with artifacts.