Reliable and secure HIPAA-compliant online medical image storage services

We are excited to offer reliable and secure HIPAA-compliant online medical image storage to the correctional medical community.

Our service provides:

• Collection of radiology films from customer sites
• Expert guidance in deciding whether to scan all or just select radiology films
• Conversion of film to digital formats for storage
• Storage of digital images directly to our Online Digital Archive
• 24/7 access to the stored records and images on-line
• Hard copy provision of individual images and records upon request

Why are we offering this service?

The time, space and resources needed to create and support in-house image storage is quite expensive. We have added the ability to digitally store and archive all of your past, present and future x-ray images and reports. In effect, what we do is take your old studies and reports and upload them to our digital warehouse. Then we give you 24/7 access to your storage space in our digital warehouse which means that you always have the ability to view old images and records with a few clicks on the keyboard. Further, we provide you with hard copies of the images upon request.

Why is this important?

Consider this, if you are still storing your images on-site, or even if you have an off-site storage facility, how would you recover those images if your storage site was struck by natural disaster? What back-up do you have if those images are lost? We provide your organization with a high-capacity, highly available digital warehouse for storing your medical images (either digitized plain film or digital images) and copies of the accompanying reports. This warehouse is a virtual environment that is housed in multiple servers to protect the records on several levels. It is, in effect, like having endless copies of your images and records, each stored in different secure and protected locations. Should one virtual warehouse go down or be lost, there are others that immediately take its place so nothing is lost and access is never interrupted. With current plain film storage, you can never achieve this kind of security.

Also consider the cost effectiveness of off-site digital warehousing. If you could eliminate or reassign the personnel resources required to manage and maintain the physical storage of images and their reports, how would that help your annual budget? We know that it takes a minimum of one clerk to manage an x-ray storage room. If you pay that clerk a salary of $25,000 (a low estimate) per year plus the cost of benefits such as insurance and vacations, not to mention employer costs like FICA, Worker’s Compensation and Unemployment Tax, you are spending nearly $40,000 per year for that employee alone. This is BEFORE you ever consider the cost of the space for the film. And how many times do you look for an x-ray and it is nowhere to be found because it is misfiled or missing altogether? Further, you could free up the space taken up by the images for other, more practical uses.

We have implemented sophisticated search tools and rapid retrieval capabilities to allow authorized users to quickly access records on a 24/7 basis via the Internet. We take the plain film from your facility, create the patient record, then digitize and upload all of the images, including scanned images of the existing reports and attach those images to that record. Then, we issue your staff individual ID’s and passwords and give them access to the records and images according to your directives.

An increasing number of diagnostic centers are moving to Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), which provide powerful capabilities that lead to improved patient care. However, managing large historical film libraries in parallel with new PACS-based electronic images is both complex and costly. Achieving a fully digital environment with no film can take years. So we have devised an online web application to eliminate the difficulties and make this new technology available to those organizations to which it was previously out of reach due to the cost of implementation.

For organizations new to digital imaging of x-ray films, or who have a need to extend their current digital imaging program to include historical film records, we offer an easy, cost-efficient scanning service to convert large historical film libraries for importing into PACS or viewing online.