Will Arnett and Amy Poehler have you had an MRI?

Siemens, Dell form alliance for cloud-based archiving

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By Cynthia E. Keen, AuntMinnie.com staff writer

February 16, 2012 – Two industry heavyweights are joining forces in cloud-based archiving on the eve of next week’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting in Las Vegas. Siemens Healthcare and Dell plan to announce an alliance to jointly deliver a cloud-based, vendor-neutral image archiving and sharing service.

Under the agreement, Siemens will incorporate Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive software into a new cloud-based platform it’s calling Siemens Image Sharing and Archiving (ISA). Both Siemens and Dell will collaboratively market the new service. Redundant archiving will be provided, with data stored in Dell’s cloud-based servers and storage.

The companies believe that the deal enables each firm to focus on what it does best: Siemens on clinical software and solutions such as PACS, and Dell on archiving software and supporting the increasingly popular shift to cloud-based computing.

“With this alliance, we are providing solutions that facilitate easy data retrieval and secure data sharing, while simplifying IT management and maintenance for the long term,” said Jamie Coffin, PhD, vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences.

AuntMinnie.com spoke with Coffin and Kurt Reiff, Siemens’ vice president of business management of syngo Americas, about the strategy behind the alliance.

U.S. launch

Siemens began selling the ISA service this week in Canada and the U.S., and it’s offering it both independently and as part of a bundle with Siemens syngo software packages.

The ISA platform provides archiving for DICOM and non-DICOM images, as well as for nonimaging data, making it possible to store almost any type of digital file, Reiff said.

The alliance represents a leveraging of what each company does best, Reiff and Coffin explained.

Siemens’ primary healthcare IT focus over the years has been to develop clinical software and solutions, which of course includes PACS. But the vendor also has a long history in cloud computing through what it calls a “private medical-grade cloud” that primarily has been used within its IT operations to host servers, server environments, and individual transactions.

Meanwhile, Dell has the ability to manage images in a very neutral and cost-effective way in a cloud-based environment, thanks in part to its acquisition of archiving services provider InSite One in December 2010.

“We see changes in the market occurring for a need for imaging data that are different from what a classic radiology or cardiology PACS can offer,” Reiff said. “With the proliferation of mobile access to data through smartphones and tablet PCs, and with the steady explosion of digital data stimulated by electronic health record adoption initiatives, the market is changing.”

He noted that Siemens’ expertise has not been focused on image storage per se, but rather on image acquisition, manipulation, and viewing. “We are experts at building clinical viewers and software, and that is where we are going to concentrate our efforts. Dell has the expertise to store data, maintain it, and protect it,” he said.

Soaring need for storage

Coffin pointed out that the amount of electronic data a clinician accesses today compared to 15 years ago has increased by 10 orders of magnitude. Storage requirements have also soared.

Ten years ago, the largest healthcare customers of Dell and other storage vendors needed about 50 TB to 100 TB for image storage. That requirement has now increased to 5 PB to 10 PB, with 1 PB equaling 1,000 TB. This dramatic increase may be attributed to the use of increasingly sophisticated diagnostic imaging modalities, such as 128-slice and 256-slice CT scanners, and by the adoption of digital pathology systems by hospitals.

Dell currently manages more than 5 billion medical images in its cloud for more than 800 customers. It offers a one-time pay-by-the-image service that enables customers to eliminate the cost of purchasing hardware, as well as expenses for operating and staffing a steadily expanding data center. Archive outsourcing also eliminates hardware and software obsolescence for customers.

“Once hospitals purchase an electronic medical record system or a PACS from a vendor, they tend to get into a state of vendor lockdown, because it is very difficult to migrate data,” Coffin said. “Or, they need to pay to migrate data every three to five years. When a customer starts using a vendor-neutral archive to store images, it is not necessary to migrate data again, at what amounts to a current cost of $5,000 to $10,000 per TB of data.”

The value of data migration from a practical point of view is mitigated by the fact that the vast majority of stored images will never be accessed. Based on the experiences of Dell, only 2% of all prior exams are accessed again within the first 12 months of acquisition (with the exception of records of oncology patients or those with chronic diseases). Even fewer exams are reaccessed after a year.

With this in mind, Dell doesn’t believe that it makes sense for community hospitals, physician practices, or small imaging centers to operate their own data centers when such services could be provided in the cloud. Archiving expenses are only going to go up, according to Coffin, and healthcare providers should be focusing on clinical issues rather than running data centers, he believes.

This creates an opportunity for the Siemens-Dell alliance, according to Reiff.

“The ability to offer full-service cloud image archiving is a huge business opportunity, especially with respect to community hospitals,” Reiff said. “Many community hospitals are struggling today to raise funds to purchase a replacement PACS and to pay to migrate the data. Then they have to maintain what they have purchased and hire staff in a market with a well-publicized shortage of qualified IT professionals.”

Coffin predicted that small hospitals, imaging centers, and multispecialty clinics will no longer operate their own internal IT data centers in five years. It simply won’t be practical, he observed.

“Siemens and Dell bring years of cloud computing experience to help healthcare customers solve their data management and archiving challenges, while facilitating collaboration across specialties, departments, and geographic boundaries,” Coffin concluded.

“This collaboration with Dell will be a game changer for us,” Reiff added.

Three Dimensional Brain Tumor Construct Created in Lab

The possibilities this creates are endless. We can use this Glioma tumor for so much research. The technology used to create the Glioma can be used to create all kinds of other similar tumors like small cell lung CA, or  maybe  other types of brain tumors. Once we recreate a collection of tumors to practice killing in the lab without any risk to the patients we can really take some chances with some creative ideas. This is a breakthrough in medicine. This opens up a whole new world of medicine. We will be closer to destroying Cancer because of this. This is great!

 

 

by GENE OSTROVSKY on Feb 16, 2012

Not all cancers are created equal. While some are easy to study in the Petri dish, others don’t do well in vitro. They often will not grow without a supporting framework of angiogenic blood vessels that supply their high metabolism with nutrients and oxygen. Performing experiments on tumors such as glioma is a difficult proposition because they only wish to reside in the body and normally don’t survive when grown outside in a laboratory environment.

Researchers at Brown University have now managed to grow a three-dimensional glioma tumor, including the supporting proximal blood vessels, and are already using it to perform experiments testing a nanomedicine approach to tumor destruction.

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Apple announcing iPad 3 first week of March? Anonymous sources think so

Is the long, treacherous wait for the iPad 3 nearly at an end? That’s what anonymous sources tell All Things D. The site caught wind that an Apple event next month will host the announcement of the company’s latest tablet. The event is said to be slated for the first week of March at that popular Apple haunt, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco — and seeing as how last year’s event was held on March 2nd, that timing doesn’t seem all that crazy to us. As for an actual release date, said sources are a bit less chatty.

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Economy causing more MRI accidents?

Insurers, the organizations that pay for the vast majority of MRI exams in the US, have been incrementally cutting the prices that they’ll pay hospitals and imaging centers for MRI studies. To a degree, this has been in response to ever-growing MRI scan volumes, which have lead to some economies of scale. A few years ago, Medicare / Medicaid switched from taking incremental nibbles off of the reimbursement rate, to lopping off a huge chunk with the budgetary equivalent of a machete, called the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA). Many commercial insurers followed suit.

The accumulated reimbursement cuts from the whole cadre of insurers has taken years following the initial enactment of the DRA to reach its full effect, just in time for the bottom to drop out of the broader economy. Now MRI providers are not only getting paid less for each exam, with many patients having to fork-over a 20% copay for the cost of their MRI exam, the number of patients walking in the door has also dropped.

A trend that began with the enactment of the DRA a few years ago may actually be building momentum, namely cutting staff, or cutting staff qualifications, to reduce the operating expenses of an MRI operation. Source

 

These reductions may be the worst thing for any hospital or outpatient center. Your greatest asset is The MRI technologist. The technologist understands MRI Safety at a level unparalleled to any one else in the diagnostic imaging environment.  As the level of training decreases of staff the level of MRI safety accidents will continue to rise inversely proportionally. This is exactly why there has been a 277%  rise in reported accidents.

This may seem a little over-simplified evaluation of a very complicated matter. However, the economy does correlate to the dramatic rise in MRI safety accidents. I can only put the pieces together. If cut backs are hurting health care at the patient level, where safety is concerned it is time to step in and make some drastic changes. Please let me know how you feel about this……