Hitachi expands Medical Imaging VNAs to include entire healthcare facility

“Hitachi Clinical Repository takes the concept of Medical Imaging VNAs and expands it to include the entire healthcare facility”

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), today introduced a new solution for healthcare providers to improve clinical decision making and resulting patient care. Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) is an information management solution that transforms raw medical data and images into meaningful information, independent of the source applications. Leveraging the company's leading intelligent data and storage management technologies, HCR creates a metadata repository based on any information system and gives healthcare providers a consolidated view of all relevant patient information. As a result, healthcare organizations can increase interoperability, significantly reduce costs while improving access to data, and better utilize electronic health records (EHRs) to meet important government healthcare initiatives.

Today's healthcare facilities are faced with explosive growth of medical information and images from every clinical department. Most of this important patient data contains additional underlying data, called metadata, that is stored in a static, proprietary format inaccessible to other applications and therefore remains unutilized. Healthcare providers are under growing pressure to take full advantage of their data - and the application silos the data reside in - to optimize how they make important patient care decisions. Creating and managing a central, integrated metadata repository of patient information is an integral component to improve facility-wide data management. Unlike current Vendor Neutral Archives (VNAs) that focus only on medical images, Hitachi Clinical Repository consolidates all patient data, standardizes the formats across disparate applications and then provides this data to EHR and portals in a single, unified view that can then be mined intelligently and distributed centrally and securely.

"Hitachi Clinical Repository takes the concept of Medical Imaging VNAs and expands it to include the entire healthcare facility," said Bill Burns, vice president, Health and Life Sciences, Hitachi Data Systems. "Its unique capability is adding patient metadata to image and non-image data, at any point in the lifecycle, to restore the long-term value to this most critical class of data. By seamlessly consolidating and presenting all relevant health and business data in a single, longitudinal record, healthcare providers can now get the most comprehensive view of their patients, regardless of which information system the data resides in. HCR enables providers to be more efficient, cost effective and innovative - it truly transforms the delivery of patient care."

Hitachi Clinical Repository: One Patient View, Facility-wide

HCR virtualizes image and non-image data from any information system and creates a metadata repository for healthcare providers to have a facility-wide consolidated view of all relevant patient information. It is comprised of several Hitachi storage technologies including Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), Hitachi NAS Platform, powered by BlueArc® (HNAS), and Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS). HCR is a standards-based interoperability framework that accepts multiple data types, parses the data and indexes the metadata, enabling interoperability between external applications such as EHRs or clinical portals.

Hitachi Data Systems provides a complete data transformation service to capture appropriate data from the many information sources within an enterprise, index that data as well as its file system, application and customer metadata, and then make that data available to external sources through the platform's API architecture.

Business rules, privacy and security requirements, quality and audit assessments, governance and workflow processes can all be applied against the indexed data for further improvements to patient care. Additional benefits of Hitachi Clinical Repository include:

• Indexing and sophisticated metadata analysis of more than 50 different document and 400 multi-purpose internet mail extensions (MIME) types, their content and possible different levels of information provides unprecedented interoperability.
• Significant reduction in waste, operational and maintenance costs while improving access to data and increasing efficiency.
• Metadata indexing improves the organization, accessibility, discoverability and long term value of data.
• Physical adoption and utilization of a single longitudinal patient record through EHR and portal solutions enables enterprise adoption and utilization of EHR solutions.

"Creating and managing metadata repositories are important components for improving enterprise data management and information exploitation," said David Floyer, CTO and co-founder, Wikibon. "HDS has incorporated its leading edge technologies into Hitachi Clinical Repository to provide a much richer metadata capture by opening and interrogating every type of object (not just standard containers) during the acquisition process. This will give clinicians improved access to information related to the patient's situation and better decision making. HCR is a model for addressing the general data management challenges within IT of extending the value of data beyond the applications that create it."

Success Story: Klinikum-Wels Grieskirchen

As one of the largest hospitals in Austria with more than 3,500 employees across 4 locations, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen needed a way to make its complex and siloed processes more automated and efficient. It now leverages HCR to consolidate patient information for its lab, radiology and unstructured content management systems, and associated metadata, to provide a consolidated view to its National eHealth application and the hospital's own clinician portal.

"Klinikum-Wels selected HCR to give providers the right information, at right time, in the right place and in the correct format," said Elmar Flamme, CIO, Klinikum-Wels-Grieskirchen. "The ability to search for information across all deployed systems, irrespective of vendor or location, is the key. Hitachi Clinical Repository gives us the flexibility to easily integrate any kind of clinical system into a facility-wide archive, creating a foundation to offer information for all clinical and administrative use cases and provide much better patient care."