By Shelby Dunlap 

Yesterday, the UK officially fell into a recession.  The US had previously been declared as in a recession since December 2007 by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

As a result, hospital budgets are facing tough times as governments and insurance companies find themselves strapped for cash, a result of a reduction in tax revenue or employer contributions.  In good times these hospitals tend to  buy new devices or systems to improve the quality of care, differentiate themselves from other hospitals, or to simply reduce their costs through efficiencies.  The latter becomes very important in a recession. 

Historically, imaging departments, such as radiology or cardiology, have purchased systems from modality or PACS manufacturers combined with a storage system, such as an HP StorageWorks EVA or XP disk array, in order to provide the necessary high-speed or real-time access to the data being created from any given exam.  Over time, those storage arrays would fill up, and the data is often moved offline to tape or an optical array which was also sold as part of the solution.  These solutions frequently turn into silos, meaning the hospital has to manage multiple storage systems, both the high speed type and the offline type. 

This becomes costly from a management perspective, creating the need to manage multiple support contracts, differing maintenance processes, and diverging hardware obsolescence plans (if they even exist).   Consolidation of offline imaging storage into one unified storage platform is an excellent solution to address this proliferation of storage systems. 

This will reduce data center footprint, increase efficiencies in workflow through online access to data (faster than tape or optical solutions), and ultimately will provide a higher ROI in the tough economic times we find ourselves in.  There will continue to be a need for high-speed arrays such as the HP StorageWorks EVA or XP in the healthcare workflow, but also a compelling need to implement an image archiving solution that provides the benefits of online storage with the low costs of simple yet powerful archival systems such as the HP Medical Archive solution.