Right-Size Storage and Your Budget With The Cloud

Regional Medical Center

Challenge: Costly Image Storage

Regional Medical Center (The Med) is a healthcare provider of efficient, quality healthcare for individuals throughout a five-state region within 150-miles of Memphis, Tennessee. Funded by government dollars from its base in Shelby County, The Med found itself pinched when new budget restrictions took hold — and its aging archive infrastructure kept racking up expenses.

The primary concern revolved around the growing archival demands of its picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). Because many of The Med’s patients are self-paying individuals who receive infrequent, often one-time, services, the most cost-effective way to handle their related medical images is through long-term storage. However, the replicated EMC Centera storage environment that supported this function was always running out of disk space — requiring The Med to purchase additional disk arrays that took up valuable and limited data center floor space. When its capital budget took a hit, The Med sought a less costly, more efficient long-term solution.

Solution: Image Storage in the Cloud

Finding an appropriate solution meant taking into consideration the privacy regulations and security requirements associated with healthcare information, as well as specific departmental needs. “Radiology owned the PACS,” explains Brad Harrison, executive director of IT at The Med. “Because they’re on the front line, they needed to know that they could still get fast access to their studies.” At the same time, IT, which managed the related PACS storage and archive, had to make sure the solution met its demands and delivered a more manageable and affordable way to plan for future growth.

During its selection process, The Med evaluated solutions from multiple vendors. Iron Mountain rose to the top with its HIPAA-compliant Iron Mountain Digital Record Center for Medical Images (DRCMI) solution and best-practices expertise. By using DRCMI to move the bulk of its image archive to the cloud, The Med would be able to take advantage of the solution’s flexible and cost-effective pay-as-you-go model. With this approach, The Med could avoid ongoing capital expenditures for disk storage and handle these costs as a more predictable operating expense. And from a performance perspective, The Med would also gain additional redundancy for improved disaster recovery.

According to Harrison, it was a perfectly tailored solution for The Med, in spite of initial concerns related to study availability. “We had to overcome some trepidation about operating in the cloud,” says Harrison. “But once Radiology understood that they would be able to access their studies as easily as before, and with no performance delays, it was a done deal.”

Fast, Simple Solution Deployment

In just a few weeks time, Iron Mountain deployed the new solution, which includes local storage and a gateway to the cloud. This approach enables fast access to studies from the archive tier of storage. In addition to the local storage, studies are automatically replicated offsite for long-term archival storage in geographically separated, high-security Iron Mountain data bunkers.

“Configuring our PACS to work with the Iron Mountain DRCMI solution was simple. All we had to do was point it to the new gateway,” explains Harrison. “The only other minor action required was to reconfigure our virtual private network so that it supported connections across Iron Mountain’s secure gateway.”

Results: Ongoing Benefits From Improved Storage Management

Since going live in March 2010, the Iron Mountain DRCMI has earned a reputation for being a worry-free, high-value solution. And it has provided The Med with a number of key benefits:

• Scalability to cost-effectively support the center’s growth on a pay-as-you-go basis
• Improved visibility into usage, trends and costs through management reports
• Enhanced disaster recovery and ability to meet recovery time and recovery point objectives
• Secure storage, access and retrieval of medical images
• Ongoing savings and cost avoidance equating to hundreds of thousands of dollars — and counting — through reduced IT infrastructure expense and improved storage lifecycle management

“Thanks to our Iron Mountain DRCMI solution, we no longer have concerns about scalability and expanding our storage infrastructure,” says Harrison. “Instead, our IT staff can monitor growth patterns and know that we can easily and cost-effectively adjust storage resources in the cloud to accommodate them as needed — without requiring additional hardware and floor space to do so.” And from a maintenance perspective, Harrison says the solution “runs day after day, with literally no issues,” enabling the IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.

That level of reliability, along with improved disaster recovery capabilities, made all the difference when The Med experienced an issue during a recent upgrade of its PACS. Instead of the expected smooth transition, the upgrade kicked off a policy that automatically deleted 400,000 studies that were over six-months old. But because the studies had been migrated by the Iron Mountain DRCMI to the cloud, Iron Mountain was able to recover them for The Med. “The Iron Mountain solution truly saved the day,” confirms Harrison.

Bottom-Line Advantage

The Iron Mountain DRCMI solution has proven to be a winner from a budgeting standpoint, as well. In fact, Harrison reports that they have been able to shave several hundred thousand dollars off of their IT budget. This includes eliminating $20,000 in monthly charges from dual OC-3 connections used for dedicated bandwidth, and expenses stemming from replicated hardware and ongoing maintenance. “Operating in the cloud has given us the chance to redesign our infrastructure and save money,” says Harrison.

Today, the Iron Mountain DRCMI solution provides cost-effective image storage for nearly 16-terabytes of data. And its solid performance has Harrison and his IT team looking at how The Med can benefit by moving other healthcare applications to the cloud.”Since we’ve cut costs and improved storage management, we’ve had a lot of interest in the Iron Mountain DRCMI solution,” says Harrison. “Overall, it’s been a real win-win experience.”