There are a host of factors that influence the decision to move the data, including regulatory compliance, data integrity, data availability, precious hospital floor space and financial savings.
Regulatory Compliance
Government and legally mandated retention periods require facilities to maintain a patients’ information for a minimum of seven (7) years, depending on the specific modality type and state in which they reside. And although the data may not ever be used, it must be readily available to comply with these standards. Facility administrators and professionals agree that having data segregated on disparate data islands is not a viable method for long term retention.
Data Integrity
The DICOM standard experienced tremendous revolution during the early stages of its development. Accordingly, the DICOM imaging implementations produced in the 1990’s differ greatly from those generated by imaging systems in use since the new millennium. Incomplete, proprietary or inconsistent versions of DICOM plague the legacy installed base of early DICOM adopters. And DICOM was originally designed for communication between technologies, not as a proper, defined database. These random implementations of DICOM, coupled with manual data entry, left behind data sets that need to be “cleansed” before they can be used on the new imaging system.
- Did you know?
- Members of the DataFirst board helped create the DICOM standard.
Data Availability
Many solutions of the 1990’s and 2000’s utilized removable media technologies such as tape, magneto optical disk, CD and DVD. These media were typically housed in robotic jukebox systems that served up each individual medium when a study requested on those media was summoned by a clinician. At the time, these technologies performed the role well. However, as data production rates grew, modality numbers and type increased; as hospital infrastructures advanced, the robotic components of the storage solution became the pacing item to retrieve a study quickly. Today, spinning disk technology is the de facto standard for storing data and jukeboxes are used to backup the data properly for long term preservation.
Financial Overhead
The floor space in a healthcare institution is a precious resource. Maintaining a legacy system that is used infrequently is an inefficient use of this space. Older systems tend to be physically large, noisy and they require a tremendous amount of maintenance. Costs to keep these systems “alive” are typically thousands of dollars per engagement since their original support contract has expired.
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