Overview

The medical system is faced with the outstanding task of managing the surging volume and increased dispersion of administrative data while also providing fast and effective medical services.

Every 2 years healthcare data has an increase of 300% and unfortunately only 28% of the hospitals are scanning all patient records.

This industry needs a modern healthcare solution to address real-world challenges, needs to use electronic conversion solutions on a daily base in compliance with legal regulations and be able to access all the electronic information any time, everywhere connectivity exists (including mobile devices), but also to reduce costs with paper based workflows.

Trends

• The number of computer tomography (CT) scans and the number of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans rose dramatically. A municipal hospital carries out around 30,000 and a university hospital as many as around 100,000 scans per year.
• Along with the number of scans, data volumes increase too. Modern imaging systems now not only supply more images; they do so at a higher resolution than a few years ago. Switch from 8- to 64-line computer tomography and data volumes increase ten-to fifteen fold, and while an MRI scan with a resolution of 256 x 256 pixels gets by with around four megabytes, an X-ray with a resolution of 3,540 x 4,740 pixels is thirty times larger at around 120 megabytes. If several scans are conducted for radiology, cardiology or neurosurgery departments, a single patient can account for up to a terabyte of data. So the capacity of conventional storage systems is soon exhausted.
• Data compression procedures may be growing more and more powerful, but experts estimate that the storage capacity requirement for medical imaging data will increase by 70 percent to 80 percent per year.
• It is not just data volumes that are on the increase; statutory retention periods are also growing longer. In radiotherapy and X-ray therapy, for example, some data must be kept for up to 30 years from the last treatment date. These lengthy periods cause problems. Due to the short service life of storage media they need to be replaced at least once a decade as a rule. Over a retention period of 30 years this means that an X-ray image must at the best of times be transferred to new hardware three times. In the least favorable case the system will need to be changed more frequently because the storage requirement trend for imaging data is hard to calculate and the solutions designed are therefore too small or too large. The consequence is renewed procurement and financing of hardware and costly migration processes.
• Although more digital imaging information is available than ever before, doctors often have no opportunity to use this data jointly. Many hospitals and medical practices still use proprietary systems that cannot share data with other solutions.