Customer Stories

Bronson Healthcare Group

“The Merge eMed solution helps us provide secure,24/7 diagnostic image availability
essential to our vision to be a national leader in healthcare quality.”

The Customer
Bronson Healthcare Group (www.bronsonhealth.com)is a community owned, not-for-profit healthcare system headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that has been serving patients since 1900. Bronson Healthcare Group member organizations include Bronson Methodist
Hospital, Bronson Vicksburg Hospital, Bronson Medical Group, Bronson Home Health Care, Bronson Staffing Service, IBA Health Plans, Bronson Lifestyle Improvement &Research Center, and the Bronson Health Foundation. With a workforce of nearly 3,900 employees, Bronson is Kalamazoo ’s second largest employer and is presently ranked by both Fortune and Working Mother magazines as one of the nation ’s 100 best places to work.

Bronson ’s vision is to be a national leader in healthcare quality. It is fulfilling this by consistently deliverying superior customer service and serving as an industry innovator in leveraging advanced technology to improve patient care.In radiology,Bronson serves as a showcase for
other healthcare facilities considering a completely filmless environment.

The Challenge:Speed Access to Patient Data while Supporting 20%Annual Growth and Complex Regulatory Requirements
The Bronson campus supports more than 20 therapies and modalities on-site, and schedules hundreds of patient exams every day. Transitioning to digital imaging in the radiology department provided a tremendous diagnostic benefit. As a result, growth across all modalities has exceeded 20%each of the last four years.
Scott Dent,Imaging Systems administrator at Bronson,explains the challenge caused by such a rapid increase.
“Using optical disk for image archival created bottlenecks in health system workflow.The technology was reliable but slow; it could take eight minutes to retrieve a historical image.As a jukebox filled and platters were moved to off-site storage, delays were even longer.Waiting for images was not productive for our radiologists or our patients, so we outlined an aggressive plan to improve the performance of our infrastructure.”

Any solution the health system pursued had to meet stringent security and data permanence requirements. “The industry generally requires that ‘once recorded,always recorded,’” says Dent..“We needed to maintain the integrity of our patient image data and address specific requirements of evolving HIPAA legislation, even in the event of a site failure.”

The Solution:Secure Medical Data Management with NetApp NearStore and SnapLock Regulatory Compliance Solution
Bronson teamed with its PACS vendor, Merge eMed, to select a networked storage solution using a NetApp fabric-attached storage (FAS) system to provide high-speed access to a large volume of digital images managed by the Fusion Matrix PACS™ solution. The health system
then launched a second project to completely eliminate film and improve access to historical images stored on the optical disk system.

Merge eMed helped Bronson select and deploy disk-based NetApp NearStore systems to provide inexpensive secondary storage. New diagnostic images are simultaneously stored on the NetApp FAS system and copied via NetApp SnapMirror software to a local NearStore system. Since permanent archives are maintained on the NearStore system,when the capacity of the NetApp FAS system reaches a predetermined high-water mark, older images are deleted.

NetApp SnapMirror software copies patient images to a second NearStore system at a redundant data center seven miles from the main facility. Mirror copies are made on-the-minute, so backup images are essentially real-time and available for nearly instantaneous disaster recovery.

A triggering event in the Fusion Matrix PACS automatically writes every image mirrored to the NearStore system to a WORM volume using NetApp SnapLock software.

Business Benefits: Expedited Service, HIPAA Compliance, Disaster Recovery
The NetApp solution enabled Bronson to completely eliminate film in less than 90 days. “Physicians have immediate access to complete sets of current and historical images from any location,” explains Dent.. “Now a doctor can take a wireless tablet right into the patient room or respond to an emergency room call at home.”

Retrieval times have gone from minutes to seconds. “Our radiologists can now read exams in half the time previously required,” points out Dent. “Retrieving historical exams off the NearStore system takes about 20 seconds versus up to eight minutes with optical disk. We can now read more than 400 exams per day and will be able to support additional load as the health system expands its offering to include new modalities.”

The combination of the Fusion Matrix PACS and NetApp SnapLock software gives radiologists enhanced flexibility to analyze diagnostic images without risk of original record alteration. Using the PACS system, radiologists can easily build consult files from existing images, create subgroups to highlight, or more effectively compare exams of interest. Because each image is locked immediately upon delivery to the NearStore system, Bronson is assured that initial record integrity will be preserved.

“SnapLock software ensures that data written to the NearStore systems is never editable or changeable,” explains Dent. “We have assurance that the original examination information is intact and unaltered at both our data center and remote disaster recovery site.

“The NetApp solution ensures that at all stages we have the data reliability and permanence required to comply with HIPAA regulations, even as they continue to evolve,” sums up Dent.

Adds Dave Mahoney ,vice president at Merge eMed ,“Bronson represents the prototype for how health systems can deploy technology to convert challenges into efficiencies.”

The reliability of the NetApp solution has been impressive.“In three years we have only had one drive failure,and that event had zero downtime impact on our user community,” says Dent. “Additionally, RAID-DP has enabled us to use economical NearStore nearline storage by ensuring that the system will remain online even if two disks fail in the same RAID group.We would be able to RAID reconstruct instead of having to restore from tape and our doctors and patients would not experience any interruption to daily operations.”

The health system met its requirements for a robust disaster recovery solution .“Even if we lost our entire data center, we could continue to serve our patients,” Dent comments. “It would require rebuilding some data volumes, but the process would be quick and behind the scenes.”

The NetApp solution also helps the health system control costs.“There were costs associated with the optical disk equipment and media itself ,work-flow costs, and the costs of maintaining a secure off-site storage facility,” notes Dent. “We’ve eliminated all these costs, plus the NetApp solution takes less than an hour per week to administer.

“The NetApp and Merge eMed solution has successfully addressed our PACS system requirements —performance improved considerably,and we can expand capacity on-the-fly while streamlining maintenance and improving staff efficiency,” sums up Dent. “NetApp also provides a platform for consolidating our infrastructure in other areas. For example, the ability to simultaneously leverage NearStore systems for both WORM and non-WORM storage results in a very flexible enterprise solution.”

See Aultman Success Story (RIS/PACS)
See Meridian Regional Imaging Success Story (RIS/PACS)
See West Coast Radiology Success Story (RIS/PACS)
See Regions Hospital Success Story (PACS)
See Pediatric Diagnostic Imaging Success Story (RIS/PACS)

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