Leading children’s hospital shares its recipe for an enterprise imaging strategy
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- iConnect® Enterprise Archive
- iConnect® Access
- Merge PACS™
Tech Stack
- DICOM
- F5 content switch
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) is a nonprofit, 600-bed academic medical center that was established in 1883. It is one of the oldest and most distinguished pediatric hospitals in the United States. The hospital provides comprehensive clinical services, from treatment of rare and complex conditions to well-child care. CCHMC serves 1.2 million patients and is consistently ranked among the best children's hospitals in the U.S. The hospital attracts patients from all 50 states and across the world, and also has a dedication to clinical research.
The Challenge
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) was facing several challenges with its imaging strategy. The hospital had limited long-term image storage for its contingency system and lacked a true disaster recovery process for full-fidelity images. Additionally, there was no documentation for ultrasound studies, which prevented the hospital from billing for imaging procedures. The hospital was also looking to expand its image storage beyond radiology and cardiology to include images from across all 'ologies. However, such a complicated change required a deliberate and careful process to ensure that images were not misplaced or inaccessible.
The Solution
CCHMC implemented Merge's iConnect® Enterprise Archive, iConnect® Access, and Merge PACS™ to address its challenges. The iConnect Enterprise Archive provided long-term image storage beyond radiology, including cardiology. It also allowed referring providers to submit images through the intelligent DICOM pathway to be automatically archived. The hospital also implemented a true business continuance with disaster recovery. The hospital now has replicated hardware at an off-site disaster recovery data center, which has the same hardware configuration as the production environment. Everything on the production enterprise archive is automatically reconciled with the disaster recovery site, offering true business continuance in exceptional situations. Merge PACS offers an integrated mode that communicates exclusively with the enterprise archive for images. Whenever the hospital switches over to the contingency server, the exact full dataset of studies will be replicated.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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