The burgeoning market for cloud-based vendor-neutral archives (VNA) has drawn another participant with a computing giant as a partner. With the help of HP, healthcare cloud computing services provider ClearData Networks is launching a cloud-based package for vendor-neutral archiving of medical images.
Making use of HP storage and server technology, ClearData is readying a range of cloud backup and recovery, offsite storage, and disaster recovery services for medical images from its data centers. ClearData is partnering with VNA providers to bring their offerings into the cloud, said David Jemmett, chief technology officer (CTO) and founder of ClearData.
"We're not competing with them; we're just adding the value of the HIPAA-compliant data center and the hosting aspect, and being able to take that offsite into the cloud," Jemmett told AuntMinnie.com.
ClearData is agnostic in its partnerships, having inked agreements with companies such as VNA provider TeraMedica and others. For example, TeraMedica will be using ClearData for primary storage with its radiology products.
"We're networking specialists; we know how to get stuff through pipes," he said.
ClearData enables images that are provided from different companies to be made available in a DICOM-compliant manner in the cloud, he said.
"That really makes it accessible to a lot of different types of providers and organizations," he said. "And of course, they can do the very strict VNA part of it as well. So we offer that flexibility."
In addition, ClearData's offerings can help address the 30% to 35% of medical images that are generated by other specialties such as oncology and cardiology, Jemmett said.
"There is a lot of stuff that's not DICOM, and I don't think it will be," he said. "It's going to boil down to tools that can effectively manage both."
The cloud can also help hospitals more efficiently meet requirements for long-term storage of medical images, said ClearData CEO Darin Brannan.
While a few small-scale implementations of ClearData cloud technology have been completed, larger projects are in the process of being rolled out and will be announced by the end of this year, Brannan said.
HP partnership
ClearData is participating in HP's CloudAgile program, which allows customers and, in particular, healthcare clients, the ability to extend their premises-based infrastructure and applications to leverage the cloud in a secure and HIPAA-compliant fashion, said David DeAngelis, Health and Life Sciences CTO at HP. The relationship is a nonexclusive one.
"ClearData has standardized on our technology stack, and so we bring technology, engineers, and design criteria and we work with ClearData to make sure that everything is 100% finely tuned in these data centers," he said.
ClearData gets access to the HP brand, and HP will also be involved in getting the word out for sales and marketing activities, he said.
"We also have a process where our field sales and our partners will be compensated for driving these services and solutions in the field," DeAngelis said.
The storage requirements for digital medical images are placing a huge demand on institutions' local IT departments, he said.
"You have hospitals that have essentially petabytes of data and they are not staffed [to handle that]," DeAngelis said. "So their natural solution [is] to offsite image storage in a secure fashion."
Other opportunities for the cloud in healthcare include backup, genomics, and research and development to leverage cloud capacity, he said.
