Cases
Simply sent: High- available long-term archive
The Knappschaft-Bahn-See hospitals originally relied on decentralized archiving with a uniform PACS. However, it quickly became clear that this approach was not ideal and that a central long-term archive would be more efficient.
The customer: Competence in rehabilitation
Knappschaft-Bahn-See has nine rehabilitation clinics and is also involved in three rehabilitation facilities. Every year, around 21,000 patients use the services of these rehabilitation clinics. This makes Knappschaft-Bahn-See one of the largest providers of rehabilitation services in Germany. In total, the Knappschaft-Bahn-See rehabilitation clinics offer around 1,500 inpatient and 135 outpatient treatment stations at 12 locations.
The challenge: Making Radiology images quickly available
The Knappschaft-Bahn-See hospitals in Bochum, Dortmund, Recklinghausen, Bottrop, Sulzbach and Gelsenkirchen originally pursued the approach of a uniform PACS solution in combination with decentralized archiving on DVD jukeboxes. However, it became clear within the first year that this approach would not last forever.
One problem was that at each hospital, one staff member spent half the workday changing DVDs to make legacy studies available for Radiology. Another factor that spoke against storage on the jukeboxes was that a disproportionately large number of occupational accidents are documented at the Knappschaft clinics, since the Knappschaft-Bahn-See once emerged from health insurance for miners.
For the associated radiological image data, this means an obligation to archive the data for a timespan of 30 years. Over this period, all images would therefore have to be migrated five to six times to new technology platforms. "The DVD jukeboxes in the individual clinics quickly ran full and the data exchange between different institutions was not easy," comments Christian Bauer, IT Manager Medical Network at Knappschaft-Bahn-See.
Against this background, Knappschaft-Bahn-See was looking for a provider that facilitated the long-term archiving of medical data. Further, they wanted to free blocked resources in the IT department.
"The central storage service solution does not cost us more. We don't have to invest nor do we have additional fees, and the monthly fixed price is manageable. For us, the project has already paid off."
Christian Bauer, Head of IT, Knappschaft-Bahn-See
The solution: Highly available digital archive
When Christian Bauer heard about Telepaxx' secure, vendor-neutral long-term archive, he was excited and analyzed the concept in more detail. After deciding on Telepaxx, things moved very quickly: The strategy and concept was developed on how to transfer the image data to the Telepaxx Cloud optimally.
All images generated by the different modalities in the six Knappschaft hospitals were sent directly to Telepaxx Medical Data. More than ten terabytes of radiological image data are accumulated each year. These can be retrieved from Telepaxx's long-term archive within seconds and made available to the hospitals as needed. For this reason, Christian Bauer was pleased about the positive feedback from radiologists on the new concept. They often do not notice whether the images are fetched from the local server or the Telepaxx server.
Due to the good collaboration, the Knappschaft hospitals are planning to send not only radiology images, but also videos of the surgery documentation and additional data to Telepaxx in the future. The data increase in the healthcare sector further continues and requires highly available, manufacturer-independent long-term archiving of medical data.
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