Confidently manage medical imaging on FlexPod

Medical imaging technology can be expensive, however. Imaging devices-such as those for CT, MRI, or PET-CT scans-require a large capital investment, and the operating expenses to cover radiologists, trained staff, and electricity can be substantial. There's also a potential cost to patient health: Unnecessary and repeated imaging examinations can expose patients to excessive ionizing radiation.

Image archiving is another cost to consider. Because medical images can be important evidence in malpractice investigations, various insurance payers and government regulations require long-duration archiving of patient information. Medical images can consume 70% of a hospital's total data storage. Popular modalities such as CT and MRI generate data in the range of a few hundred megabytes per patient study. But newer imaging technologies such as digital pathology generate data that reaches gigabytes per whole-slide scan.

Traditionally, each imaging device manufacturer provided a PACS application to archive, access, review, and annotate DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format images that their own devices produced. This individual PACS approach led to the creation of information silos across a hospital or medical imaging facility. Different healthcare software can require different and incompatible combinations of database, OS, hardware, and communication protocols. For example, a PACS application might require a NAS protocol to serve files and a SAN protocol to serve a database workload. Unless a single storage system can natively cater to both protocols, IT administrators must manage separate storage systems for the NAS and SAN requirements.

These challenges can be compounded by frequent mergers and acquisitions (M&A) of healthcare organizations. In 2019, in the United States alone, 85 healthcare M&A transactions occurred. With such M&A, multiple instances of different medical imaging software can be inherited, requiring each imaging application to be maintained in its legacy architectural silo.