Iowa Health System Collaborates With IBM to Improve Access to Medical Data

Iowa Health System Collaborates With IBM to Improve Access to Medical Data

Iowa Health System (IHS) today 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 (NYSE: IBM) and Bycast, Inc., 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.

Read the complete Press Release