Radiology in the Cloud: How to Store Petabytes of Medical Images

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Intermountain, a nonprofit health system of 22 hospitals and more than 185 physician clinics in Salt Lake City, stores petabytes of data ranging from EHR to medical images. Making all those high resolution image files available in easily accessible storage is an expensive and challenging undertaking.

When hospitals have multiple picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), Duke noted, getting images off one system onto another can be a challenge. Hospitals with multiple facilities need to be able to take any type of radiology image and make it transportable and viewable for other clinicians in the organization.

Therefore, Intermountain uses a single PACS. "Having a single archive that's enterprise-wide, it makes it more transportable," said Duke. "You can put them in the hands of the clinicians anywhere they need to be viewed."

It is also important that the archive be vendor-neutral. Storing it over the long term, protecting it, and business continuity are all made easier in a vendor-neutral environment. Interoperability is a key, and if a company needs to add a new PACS system in three years, the images in the old system won't have to be moved, he suggested.

"We wanted to break down the silos that are generally created within imaging architectures," said Duke. "Right now we have a cardiology silo, we have a radiology silo, and we have other silos here and there. By aggregating them in one single archive, now I don't have to worry about it."

Duke advises that healthcare organizations consider a hybrid cloud, which is a combination of both storage onsite and in the cloud. There are advantages to security and compliance in a hybrid cloud, but they are more expensive. You have to know if it is a fit for your organization. Duke says:

If you were a smaller facility, it might not be cost effective for you to [use a hybrid cloud]. Healthcare and the word 'cloud' have not really gone together very well, but if the vendor can manage the security and privacy and manage the reliability, then it's certainly something to look into and evaluate as you're trying to figure out your own infrastructure.

Keeping copies of images in multiple locations is a key benefit of a hybrid cloud, Duke noted. Without this redundancy, CIOs would have to create thousands of tape backups that could take years to restore in the event of a disaster, he said. In a vendor-neutral archive, "we'd just switch to that other copy that's stored in a remote datacenter and start operating again."

When shopping for an archiving platform, make sure the company has experience with PACS systems. Duke said:

If you're talking to a vendor, make sure they've had some experience interacting with the PACS systems that are already in your environment. Make them show you how they operate in order for you to get some faith and trust that they're going to protect your data as well as you, if not better than how you would protect it.

If you can streamline your archiving and take advantage of the access and durability of the cloud, you'll likely get a good handle on your straining image archive. You can't eliminate the cost, but you can do a lot to keep it from getting out of control. What about you? How does your healthcare system approach archiving massive amounts of radiology data? Is a hybrid cloud the way to go? Would you choose a vendor-neutral archive? Comment below.