Iowa Health System (IHS) has announced it will utilize IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS) to allow cardiology, radiology and other digital images to be shared across multiple sites and securely stored for years to help improve patient care, advance research and reduce administrative costs.

Working with IBM and Bycast, IHS will establish an enterprise-wide storage system, based on IBM GMAS to address the exponential growth of IHS' imaging and other fixed content data, such as audio, video and medical documents. Fast, reliable solutions like GMAS will help IHS clinicians gain 24X7 access to medical data so they can respond quickly to changing patient conditions. And, with this new solution, IHS will be able to cost effectively establish baseline technologies and enable Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) applications and other systems to more readily access medical images, scans and other documents.

"Providing our patients with the best possible healthcare, while controlling costs, is a top priority for IHS," said Jim Mormann, CIO, Iowa Health System. "In order to manage our existing 13TB PACS, that is expected to double in size over the next year, we turned to IBM and its industry standard grid solution to give us the scalability and a secure, high availability archive at significantly lower operational costs than our previous solution."

By implementing GMAS, which is a key component of IBM's Information Lifecycle Management Infrastructure Solution Portfolio for Healthcare, IHS will be able to easily deploy a disaster recovery plan over a wide area network, maintain business continuance by allowing clinical applications to operate in the presence of faults and verify authenticity of retrieved data, auto-rebuild corrupted data.

"Customers like Iowa Health System are utilizing innovative technology to help deliver improved patient centric care," said Bruce Gardner, director, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences. "A solution such as IBM GMAS can help reduce the complexity and cost of managing medical images and data so clinicians can effectively and efficiently access patient information."

IBM GMAS utilizes Bycast StorageGRID Software and integrates IBM System Storage DS4000, IBM System Storage EXP100 Expansion Unit and xSeries servers. Both single and multiple rack configurations are available for additional secure disaster recovery and to support affordable entry and expansion as healthcare providers' needs change.

IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution, which is part of IBM's broader Grid solution offerings, incorporates open standard grid technology and joins the IBM portfolio of archive solutions that includes IBM System Storage DR550, IBM System Storage Archive Manager, the recently announced "E-mail Archiving and Storage Solution" and IBM WORM tape offerings, usable to address regulatory compliance and resiliency requirements for long-term healthcare data retention.