ASHTEAD, UK – BridgeHead Software and Dell have collaborated on a project that offers hospitals a new way to store their medical and administrative data: in a centralized repository.

The Medical Archive solution combines the strength of Dell’s hardware offerings with the pedigree of BridgeHead’s healthcare data management software to create what Dell and BridgeHead executives call a holistic and fully interoperable enterprise solution for hospitals looking to take control of their digital patient and administrative information.

“The Medical Archive solution that BridgeHead and Dell bring embodies our collective ethos of supporting and underpinning the electronic patient record and empowering IT at healthcare organizations of all sizes to meet their growing storage needs without compromising on current hardware brand or media type,” said Tony Cotterill, BridgeHead's CEO.
 
The joint solution addresses one of the major data management challenges currently facing hospitals worldwide: the upsurge in healthcare data resulting from the immense and increasing volume of medical images (digital radiology, mammography), the adoption of the electronic patient record and the move to a paperless environment (including the retroactive scanning of historical patient information).
 
The Medical Archive integrates the data from disparate clinical and administrative systems into a central, scalable repository that wholly understands healthcare data types and standards. Not only does this make interoperability easier across hospital applications, BreidgeHead executives say, but it radically simplifies the protection and security of digital information. Furthermore, hospitals can dramatically reduce the data management burden in terms of both resource and cost.

"We continue to see an exponential growth of storage in healthcare where more and more information is being stored digitally," said Brett Roscoe, worldwide marketing lead for Dell Enterprise Storage. "Organizations require integrated hardware and software solutions that enable them to efficiently store, manage and discover their digital content. Working with Bridgehead Software, we are able to offer customers our storage platform with an industry-leading medical archiving solution from a proven information management leader."
 
"We realized in our early discussions with Dell that there was a meeting of minds," said Cotterill. "We’re delighted to be partnering with an organization that takes healthcare as seriously as we do. We both recognized that hospitals have significant challenges when it comes to the management and storage of data. Our aim was to provide a cost effective, future-proof solution that simplified the data management and storage process while providing robust content protection and security, as well as increasing operational efficiencies that positively affect patient care. Our Medical Archive solution does exactly that.”