Mach 7 (MT7) Technologies, a provider of enterprise clinical image management solutions, and Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider to co-market offerings, have agreed to form a solution that combines cloud storage and routing capabilities to allow healthcare IT professionals to own, share, and get access to their critical medical imaging data across their patients' continuum of care, using vendor-neutral archiving and cloud-archiving solutions, according to a company press release.
The press release reports that, with the new agreement, M7T will pull together the functions of its Keystone Suite Enterprise Clinical Imaging Platform with Logicalis's Enterprise Cloud solution to help healthcare providers manage their IT infrastructures while also cutting costs, all done over the Internet where data can be stored and managed using cloud computing.
M7T helps healthcare enterprises worldwide pull together “PACS vendors, consolidate DICOM and non-DICOM image data, reduce the time it takes to bring new PACS live with an intelligent migration, and save money with the capabilities of Keystone Suite,” the press release states.
The partnership with Logicalis allows customers to store their medical imaging data in a cloud infrastructure, while still having the routing and lifecycle management workflow from Keystone Suite.
Healthcare organizations have been slow to embrace “the cloud” because of privacy and security issues. How can private data be kept confidential and secure on the Internet?
Certainly some providers are thinking hard about moving to the cloud. And, while some are already signing up for SaaS subscriptions for business- and administrative-related applications, many are still hesitating to put their clinical software and patient data in what they consider to be a potentially unsafe environment, according to Marianne Kolbasuk McGee.
"If I'm going to take the records of two million patients and put it out on the cloud, there needs to be a great level of trust. HIPAA violations--besides risking the trust of patients--can be incredibly expensive to handle for a healthcare provider,” Springfield Clinic CIO Jim Hewitt told McGee in an interview. The clinic is a multi-specialty physicians group with 280 doctors serving two million patients in 14 counties in central Illinois, according to the story.
Yet, rural healthcare providers in Colorado, via the Colorado Telehealth Network (CTN), can use cloud-based electronic health records to obtain remote consults from big-city specialists, and connect online with the Colorado Regional Health Organization (CORHIO), a statewide health information exchange, according to a story by Ken Terry.
Often, patients in rural areas have a hard time getting to the doctor –or there are no doctors or specialists nearby. Telemonitoring, which sometimes is done over the cloud, allows doctors to remotely stay in touch with these patients.
Market share has increased significantly in the past few years, Erik Bermudez, author and KLAS research director, told InformationWeek Healthcare in another article by Ken Terry. So it looks like the cloud is coming and we’re not in for stormy weather!
"Mach 7 Technologies is excited to offer our customers the option to store clinical imaging data in the Cloud," concluded John Memarian, general manager, sales and marketing, at M7T, in the press release. "By providing a gateway to Logicalis's Enterprise Cloud solution, we continue to offer sophisticated technology that is consistent with our commitment to extend innovative imaging solutions to our customers in the USA and abroad."
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
