Modernizing 150 TB of Data for 92 Hospitals in 22 States

for one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the U.S.

Business Need

  • Need to decommission older PACs system at 2 locations
  • Classification of data and to gain data insights from the PACs images
  • Maintain the data in the PACs images even without the original PACs systems
  • Migrate images to Netapp storagegrid 11 system for cost optimization
  • Have the ability to retrieve patient’s data in the future if necessary

Challenges Faced

  • PACS systems stored images on older NetApp StorageGrid9 platform with only CIFS/SMB and NFS protocol capabilities.
  • StorageGrid9 is being retired, and it is at its end-of-support/ end-of-life stage
  • Lack of knowledge about the patient’s data
  • High maintenance cost of the old data systems

Solution Offered

Implemented Data Dynamics’ StorageX capabilities:

  • The StorageX F2O API was selected because it provided a way to move each image seamlessly and added relevant object tags as files are transformed.
  • It was used for metadata analysis and classification of PACs images
  • A custom script was generated out of each image name after analysis of its relevant metadata. The script created a F2O API job for each image.
  • StorageX was connected to an on-premise storage to collect the necessary image file, transformed it to an object of the same name in the destination SG11 bucket and added the appropriate object tags which described the image.

    Business Impact

    Modernization of the data systems leading to improved patient care:

    • Data enrichment through intelligent data classification by metadata analysis
    • Enabled the ability to study and derive insights from the patient’s data for the ease of retrieval
    • The migration into object storage with improved patient’s data access and cost savings
    • Data can now be accessed with or without PACs system
    • Addition of object tags helped in easy retrieval of patient’s care for future reference thereby enabling improved patient care
    • Decommission old PACs systems and saved on the maintenance costs of the old datasystems
    Download case study