Billion images in Carestream cloud

Coverage from World of Health IT 2010, Barcelona

Carestream Health has announced that more than one billion images are now stored in its eHealth Managed Services storage cloud worldwide.

The company, which made the announcement at World of Health IT in Barcelona, said the images represent more than 500 terabytes of data. They are held across its eight data centres in five countries in Europe and the US.

Carestreams’ eHealth Managed Services incorporates eHealth archive services including PACS and collaboration services for hospitals and radiology centres.

Data that is stored in the centres is secure and instantly retrievable by authorised users, allowing them to access enabling multi-site workflow.

The news comes as the Maasstad Ziekenhuis hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, announced that it had become the latest hospital to use the eMS for the remote storage of DICOM and non-DICOM data.

The hospital signed the deal with Carestream last summer and has now started using the service as PACS-neutral remote archive to secure more than 180,000 images generated by the facility.

Tjeerd Canrinus, IT manager at Maasstad Ziekenhuis, said: “We selected Carestream Health to migrate and manage our large volumes of data as they were ahead of their competitors in leveraging an eMS service, in particular with their technical configuration and expertise.”

The hospital is now in the process of migrating an additional 25 terabytes of legacy data and says it is planning to make the eMS the foundation of a full information management system at Maasstad Ziekenhuis.

Canrinus added: “We had a smooth connection to the service and are now archiving all sorts of data without any management burden. We have even started discussions to expand the services to other data produced by Maasstad hospital.”

Carestream now has plans to open more data centres in Japan and Argentina over the next year.