The healthcare industry generates a staggering amount of data, accounting for nearly one-third of the world’s data volume. The amount of data generated by healthcare providers can seem overwhelming, and it can overwhelm an organization’s ability to find valuable insights that can help doctors and patients.
Tirol Kliniken in Innsbruck, Austria, manages one of the largest healthcare vendor-neutral sites in Europe with a data volume of over 740 TB, including more than 1 billion objects containing both DICOM (Digital Imaging and Medical Communications) studies and non-DICOM data, with approximately 5 TB of data stored in the archive each month.
This rapid growth has created an ever-increasing need for a comprehensive medical data management system. “Without powerful tools, it would be impossible to manage the 190 GB of data that is generated every day,” says Andreas Nuener, Head of IT Special Systems at Tirol Kliniken.
Increasing data volumes are only part of the challenge: different data types stored in different formats pose additional obstacles to efficiently storing, retrieving and sharing clinically relevant patient data.
Healthcare providers, physicians and patients need data systems that fulfill several key functions:
1. Interoperability. The ability to connect and share information across disparate IT systems to reduce administrative burden and streamline workflow is essential to delivering high-quality care in the modern healthcare environment.
2. Flexibility. When organizations adopt one flexible enterprise-wide imaging and reporting system to replace separate software products used across various clinical departments, they can lower their total cost of ownership by eliminating costly redundancies and reducing elements such as installation, training, maintenance and upgrades.
3. Modularity. The modular architecture allows healthcare providers and systems to customize their enterprise information IT systems to their specific needs, including specialized applications for reading and reporting, AI-powered features, advanced visualization, and third-party tool integration.
4. Scalability. Your solution should be designed to grow with your organization, expanding the number of servers and storage capacity as needed.
Manage data about patients, not departments
Using information technology to minimize administrative burdens and streamline workflow is essential to providing high-quality care in the modern healthcare environment.
By combining an open image and data management (IDM) system with an intuitive reading and reporting workspace, healthcare companies can consolidate patient data that’s spread across multiple data silos into one place.
The goal is to bring together imaging data, diagnostic software elements, and clinical tools in a single, intuitive workspace to provide a patient-centric view with all relevant information at hand, for both routine and more complex cases. Because all data is accessed and managed in one place, every clinician involved in a patient’s care can trust the reliability of the information they access.
Enhanced patient care
Tirol Kliniken’s robust IDM integrates patient data, connects systems across the enterprise and enables simple, standards-based connections to existing information systems and subsystems such as healthcare information systems (HIS) and radiology information systems (RIS).
The organization’s central universal archive stores nearly all image and multimedia data acquired from the five sites that make up the healthcare organization and is connected to more than 250 subsystems from more than 100 vendors.
Clinicians use the IDM front end either globally or via the web, either way medical professionals have access to patient data from multiple sources, enabling a more advanced level of care.
“What I like most is its versatility and tight integration,” says Dr. Gerhard Pierer, head of the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Cosmetic Surgery at Innsbruck University Hospital. “It gives us a comprehensive, patient-centric view of all our patients’ DICOM and non-DICOM data.”
By eliminating silos and giving clinicians efficient and secure access to clinically relevant information, Tirol Kliniken is able to transform data into a strategic asset for healthcare professionals and the patients they care for.
See how Syngo Carbon Core can help healthcare organizations Share deeper insights to support quality patient care
