In the healthcare world, it’s all about improving patient outcomes and saving lives. Technology can either impede or accelerate a healthcare organization’s capability to perform the actions needed to provide proper care. And, in the era of COVID-19, it is increasingly important that medical professionals be able to access a patient’s records as well as their medical imaging (CT Scans, X-rays, and MRIs) in a timely manner so that they can treat the patient effectively.
<h2>Why is Rapid Access to Medical Records & Imaging Critical?</h2>
Rapid access to patient’s medical records and past medical images gives the doctor background on pre-existing and chronic conditions. With this improved understanding of the patient’s health history, they can more effectively diagnose illnesses and disease, and then set the course to begin treatment.
<h2>How Can We Help Eliminate Technology Bottlenecks at Hospitals?</h2>
The right technology may be key to helping reduce or even eliminate bottlenecks at hospitals, especially when they are overloaded with patients. Increased patient loads need technology that can keep pace by providing an accurate picture of the patient’s past and present health status.
<h2>What Technology is Needed in Today’s Hospitals?</h2>
Besides the need in today’s hospitals for more beds, respirators and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), healthcare organizations need a solution that can support all their imagery applications including X-Rays, MRI and picture archiving and communication system (PACS) applications. Additionally, the solution must fit the health organization’s requirements to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as other regulations.
<h2>What Are the Storage Requirements for Medical Imaging?</h2>
Medical imaging requires a highly scalable storage solution, as medical images are often large files that need to be stored long term. As new imagery systems are providing higher resolution results, the file sizes are increasing also. Organizations also need the ability to protect and search those records. This is an ideal case for object storage, and Caringo Swarm in particular. <a href="https://www.caringo.com/products/swarm">Caringo Swarm Object Storage</a> utilizes standard servers and is massively scalable to hundreds of petabytes. Swarm has built-in data protection and metadata search to ensure data can be easily located when needed.
Over the past 14 years, Caringo Swarm has been used by hospitals, medical research and federal agencies in storing and protecting patient data. Object Storage has changed the way that medical records are stored and retrieved. Gone are the days where records are managed manually on prem, or physical copies are ordered and shipped. This has eliminated what can be a catastrophic treatment delay for a patient. It also means that records are not at risk in disasters such as floods and fires.
Now that records are stored and retrieved digitally from a centralized location, medical practitioners can access them using modern technology such as a tablet or laptop device. If your organization is looking to upgrade its infrastructure to support these potentially life-saving technologies, <a href="https://www.caringo.com/company/contact">contact us</a>.
Register now for our April 28 Tech Tuesday webinar now to learn about <a href="https://www.caringo.com/webinars/hardware-selection-object-storage">hardware selection for object storage</a>.
<a href="https://www.caringo.com/webinars/hardware-selection-object-storage"><img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hardware-selection-object-storage.png?resize=640%2C360&ssl=1" alt="Object storage: hardware selection" width="640" height="360" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15730" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hardware-selection-object-storage.png?w=640&ssl=1 640w, https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hardware-selection-object-storage.png?resize=480%2C270&ssl=1 480w, https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hardware-selection-object-storage.png?resize=320%2C180&ssl=1 320w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a>
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Access to patient data and medical imaging is critical in healthcare and medical facilities with COVID-19. Learn what storage technology to consider

David Fabrizio joined Caringo in 2016 as the Western US Regional Manager and is currently our Business Development Manager. With 19 years in data storage and backup sales. David enjoys helping customers solve their storage challenges and meet their business goals. David loves spending time with family, listening to music and traveling.

David Fabrizio

Build an Electronic Health Record (EHR) Active Archive with Caringo Swarm's policy-based data lifecycle management and built-in data protection.

Electronic Health Record

Caringo Swarm solves Healthcare IT issues with a highly automated storage platform, delivering a secure & accessible unified medical archive for data.

Healthcare

Caringo Swarm Object Storage stores digital medical images, reports & medical records while helping meet HIPAA, state & local healthcare regulations.

Medical

Object storage (object-based storage) is computer data storage architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to file storage & block storage.

Object Storage

Caringo Swarm Object Storage integrates with many PACs (picture archiving and communication systems) and other medical imaging applications. 

Picture Archiving &amp; Communication System

Caringo Tech Tuesday webinars offer insight into Object Storage technology and how Swarm works, plus gives you access to our storage SMEs.

Tech Tuesday

Accessing Healthcare Records In Today’s Digital World

Picture Archiving & Communication System

<img class="size-medium wp-image-5541 alignright" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Healthcare-Data.png?resize=300%2C231&ssl=1" alt="Healthcare Data" width="300" height="231" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Healthcare-Data.png?resize=300%2C231&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Healthcare-Data.png?w=372&ssl=1 372w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" data-recalc-dims="1" />As unpleasant of a subject as it is, there are times when Health IT is asked to produce data due to a legal matter. To mitigate the risk of not being able to produce said data in a timely fashion, which has very ugly consequences, let’s quickly define your options for storing and protecting healthcare data:
<ul>
<li>Mutable: Storing a file in a mutable way means you can modify or delete it at any time.</li>
<li>Immutable: Storing a file in an <a href="https://www.caringo.com/blog/object-storage-whats-name/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">immutable</a> way means you can not modify it or delete it. In best of breed storage systems you can set immutability to expire after a specified time.</li>
<li>WORM: Storing a file on WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) storage means it can never be modified or deleted.</li>
<li>Legal Hold: Legal Hold takes a snapshot of data and stores it in an immutable way so that you can continue to modify the original data set.</li>
<li>Auditable storage: Storage that keeps track of every action and point of access on a storage system.</li>
<li>Integrity Seals: Patented Caringo technology that lets you store a hash of a specific file in a way that can be upgraded in the future to track developments in hashing technologies. This sealed file can be used in a court of law because the seal proves that the file hasn’t been tampered with.</li>
</ul>
The ideal Health IT storage architecture uses a combination of all of these options; mutable storage for the EHR application because health records are continuously changing, immutable storage and WORM storage for the PACS images to increase legal protections and protect from accidental deletion. It is common for EHR applications to also periodically take a snapshot of everything and transmit the deltas to WORM storage, so there is an unalterable record of the version of the patient’s file on that day and time. Legal Hold is needed in case there is litigation, but files still need to be modified. Similarly if there is an intrusion or some issue that needs to be investigated, audit logs are needed to show exactly what happened or if a file was truly compromised.
So, why do you need more than WORM? Because as you can see from above different levels of file protection are needed throughout the life of healthcare files. You need a storage system that keeps logs of who did what to which files at what time, and you need to be able to prove that those logs cannot be altered, even by the root system administrator. And you have to prove that the system does not ever let a file or any of its revisions be deleted. There is no way the EHR or PACS application can make those guarantees, and neither can the operating system or hypervisor.
Have questions? Check out our <a href="https://www.caringo.com/resources/case-studies.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">case studies</a> to see how we have helped organizations like yours. Feel free to <a href="https://www.caringo.com/company/contact.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">contact us</a> or learn more in our Protecting Medical Data <a href="https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13173/198121" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">webinar</a> on May 26.
<a href="https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13173/198121" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-4373" src="https://www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Register-Now.svg" alt="Register Now" width="328" height="65"> 
</a>

There are many options for storing and protecting healthcare data, but which is right for your organization? Caringo Swarm provides an automated storage solution.

Don studied electrical engineering at Cornell University followed by a career in high-tech that included five years at Intel, ten years at HP, seven years at Microsoft and five years at EMC—to name a few. Don’s area of expertise is product management and product marketing for deep high-tech products.

Don Chouinard

With Caringo Swarm Object Storage, you get continuous, built-in data protection along with exceptional resilience, recovery, and content integrity. 

Data Protection

WORM (write once read many) is used in some data storage solutions (e.g., Caringo Swarm Object Storage) to ensure that information cannot be modified.

WORM

Object Storage, WORM & Integrity Seals for Healthcare Data

<img class=" wp-image-5824 alignright" src="https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Healthcare-Blog.png?resize=291%2C230&ssl=1" alt="Healthcare-Blog" width="291" height="230" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Healthcare-Blog.png?zoom=2&resize=291%2C230&ssl=1 582w, https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Healthcare-Blog.png?zoom=3&resize=291%2C230&ssl=1 873w" sizes="(max-width: 291px) 100vw, 291px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Why is everybody talking about active archives? Data protection begins with the concept of having a copy of the data that resides on a primary storage system safely stored offsite. Traditional backup and restore software can be used to perform this task, but there are several problems with this class of technology. For example, during the weekly and monthly full backups, the destination has to be local to keep up, then the backups have to be replicated to a remote site for safety. But that’s not the worst part. How is an item of data retrieved from the backups? How are the contents of the backups searched? What if the amount of data is so large that it cannot be backed up or replicated practically?
There are many compelling use cases for Caringo object storage. Swarm provides data protection, management, organization and search at massive scale. So, you no longer need to migrate data into disparate solutions for content delivery, ongoing analysis, and dynamic preservation. You can consolidate all your files on Swarm, find the data you are looking for quickly, and reduce total cost of ownership by continuously evolving hardware and optimizing use of their resources.
One of the use cases where Caringo shines is in use as an active archive, offloading mission-critical Windows servers in the healthcare industry, because it overcomes the pain and the problems inherent in both backup and restore and replication technologies. What’s really going on in an active archive? Here’s a quick thumbnail. Applications that run on Windows use the NTFS file system. The NTFS file system lives on a volume, which could be a direct-attached drive in the local server or a LUN on an iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN. Users and applications are accustomed to specific pathnames to access files on the NTFS file system to which they have been granted access. The goal is to offload primary storage without needing to make any changes to applications or for users.
Caringo Swarm uses the NTFS file system’s reparse point technology to make a copy of the file onto Swarm and to leave behind a shortcut. When a user or program goes to access a file at a specific pathname, the reparse point is triggered and the file is retrieved from the Swarm cluster immediately. Policies may direct Swarm to move files older than a certain age or of a specific type or in a particular directory to the active archive on a continuous basis. It is not unusual for up to 80% of the expensive direct-attached or SAN-based storage to be freed up, which more than justifies the cost of the Caringo storage system.
The files on Swarm are stored at a quarter of the cost and are better protected, based on <a href="https://www.caringo.com/resources/faqs.html#q9">Elastic Content Protection</a> technology that uses advanced M of N <a href="https://www.caringo.com/resources/whitepaper-ec.html">erasure coding and replication</a> together for ultimate protection that is effortless to operate and superior to ancient and inadequate RAID technology. Because it is working continuously to protect healthcare information, it is easier for Swarm to keep up with the workload. Searching for a piece of data is as easy as on any local Windows file search—nothing special or new to learn. And lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the time and resources needed to do backups of the Windows servers or keep replicas off site are also reduced by up to 80%.
Caringo software-defined object storage is easy to deploy and maintain and can scale to meet any need with pay-as-you-grow economics using standard servers. To hear more about how Caringo Object Storage is being used in real-world use cases, join our VP of Product Tony Barbagallo on May 26 for the <a href="https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13173/198121">Protecting Healthcare & Life Sciences Data</a> webinar.
<a href="https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13173/198121" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-1973" src="https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Register-Now.png?resize=198%2C44&ssl=1" alt="Register Now" width="198" height="44" srcset="https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Register-Now.png?zoom=2&resize=198%2C44&ssl=1 396w, https://i1.wp.com/www.caringo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Register-Now.png?zoom=3&resize=198%2C44&ssl=1 594w" sizes="(max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a>

The healthcare industry has adopted object storage as an active archive to protect data and overcome issues with traditional backup and restore technology.

Caringo Swarm Object Storage provides an active archive (limitless & seamless pool of data) with data protection, management and search capabilities.

Backup &amp; Recovery

Object-based storage (e.g., Amazon S3-compliant Caringo Swarm Object Storage) is the basis for all Cloud Storage⏤private, public or hybrid).

Cloud Storage

Caringo Swarm Object Storage uses both replication and erasure coding for flexible choice and automatic, adaptive transition between protection forms.

The Topic

Electronic Health Record

Related Topics

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Accessing Healthcare Records In Today’s Digital World

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Healthcare Data Protection with Active Archive