Dell announced this morning that it is delivering new cloud-based services to simplify secure information access and sharing for physicians and hospitals and improve healthcare efficiency from the point of care to the data center and business office. The service offerings are designed for hospitals and physician practices that want to focus less on managing information and more on using it to improve patient care and to maximize reimbursements. Additionally, Dell’s recent purchase of Security-as-a-Service provider, SecureWorks, creates the foundation for Dell solutions that incorporate security into all aspects of how customer applications and data are deployed and managed.
Dell’s subscription-based, cloud-enabled service solutions for healthcare include:
Archiving-as-a-Service – Dell’s Unified Clinical Archiving (UCA) solution is now available through the private cloud as a result of Dell’s acquisition of medical archiving firm InSite One, which Dell announced it would acquire back in December 2010. Medical image data in North America is projected to grow more than 35 percent annually to reach nearly 2.6 million terabytes by 20141. By consolidating and moving archiving to the cloud with flexible per-study pricing, hospitals reduce data storage and retention costs and free up resources for critical business objectives, thereby improving the delivery of healthcare. Importantly, Dell’s standards-based, cloud-enabled UCA service overcomes the chief barriers to image sharing — silos created when hospitals and hospital networks use multiple clinical applications such as Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS). Dell data migration services also simplify the transition to the private cloud for healthcare organizations while Dell’s recovery/backup solution ensures that information is managed safely and securely in support of HIPAA compliance and Protected Health Information protection. These secure, cloud-based Unified Clinical Archive services are available now.
“The cloud puts the emphasis where it should be for every medical professional and medical facility—using information to care for patients and using information to improve the way we care for them,” said Dr. John Halamka, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences Advisory Board member. “Small practices want to care for patients, not manage servers. The cloud empowers clinicians with low cost, high reliability solutions, enabling doctors to focus on the patient and not on the hardware in their office.”
Analytics and Reporting-as-a-Service – Dell is collaborating with Microsoft to develop a subscription-based analytics, informatics and Business Intelligence (BI) solution that will provide community hospitals with a consolidated view of patient information, helping further promote compliance with state and federal reporting requirements. The solution will combine Microsoft Amalga, a health intelligence platform, with Dell’s cloud infrastructure and expertise in informatics, analytics and consulting. Dell’s solution will provide hospitals with a Quality Indicator System (QIS), which goes beyond the CMS-required metrics to deliver advanced alerts and reduce the likelihood of missing metrics. The QIS will capture data as a patient enters the hospital, determine which quality measures may apply to the patient, and enable the hospital to track and measure compliance to those quality metrics throughout the patient’s stay. It will also simplify quality-of-care reporting required by Medicare and Medicaid for maximum reimbursement. The offering will mark the first time the Microsoft Amalga platform will be available as a service, making its price point attractive to community hospitals that typically don’t have the purchasing power previously required for robust analytic and reporting tools. These solutions will be available later this year.
Platform-as-a-Service – Dell’s MSite solution gives hospitals using MEDITECH access to the Health Care Information System (HCIS) software through the cloud. With MSite, Dell hosts MEDITECH applications in a state-of-the-art private cloud and provides technical and applications support, maintenance and disaster recovery at a predictable monthly cost. MSite also allows hospitals to more quickly and cost-effectively upgrade to newer versions of MEDITECH by alleviating upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs associated with running the platform onsite. Dell’s MSite solution is available today.
To simplify and secure access to clinical information at the point of care, Dell, in collaboration with MEDITECH, has developed a virtual-desktop solution for MEDITECH hospitals known as Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) for MEDITECH. The virtual desktop reduces PC management costs, provides for full single sign-on and session mobility, and eliminates the need for local storage, thereby reducing the risk of data loss or security breaches. Dell is helping MEDITECH and its hospitals simplify application management and scale performance with virtualization and private cloud computing.
EMR-as-a-Service. Today, Dell’s private cloud hosts EMR and practice management software for more than 40,000 clinicians as a part of its integrated EMR solution for hospital-affiliated and employed physicians.
Dell’s cloud solutions for the Virtual Era extend from virtualization of IT resources to the deployment and use of private or public clouds. Dell’s cloud solutions portfolio is designed to help customers maximize IT investments and efficiently scale their computing infrastructure to meet dynamic business and information demands. The Dell cloud solutions portfolio includes cloud consulting services; software-as-a-service; platform-as-a-service; infrastructure-as-a-service and servers and storage optimized for the cloud.
