MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Symantec Corp. today announced the successful compatibility testing between Symantec Health, a cloud-based medical image archiving solution, and Siemens Healthcare's picture archiving and communication system (PACS) solutions. The Siemens SYNGO Connectivity Competence Center (CCC), in collaboration with Symantec, conducted connectivity tests between Symantec Health and several Siemens imaging IT applications -- syngo.plaza and syngo Imaging for Radiology, and syngo Dynamics for Cardiology. Symantec is the first DICOM archive -- a standard for handling, storing, printing and transmitting information in medical imaging -- to complete validation testing with Siemens' new syngo.plaza agile PACS solution where 2D, 3D and 4D reading come together in one place.

Symantec Health helps lower storage costs by enabling healthcare providers to pay only for the storage capacity they use. Additionally, Symantec Health customers receive disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities through Symantec's geographically distributed, highly available data centers. Symantec Health supports a healthcare organization's existing workflow and serves as a complement to a provider's existing PACS infrastructure, such as Siemens PACS solutions.

"Siemens places a high value on rigorous testing of third-party applications that interact with our PACS," said Rik Primo, director of marketing and strategic relationships for SYNGO Americas at Siemens Healthcare. "Connectivity testing in our CCC lab with technologies like Symantec Health ensures that our customers can confidently use the two solutions without the need for onsite connectivity customization."

"While the cost of raw storage is decreasing, providers have to factor in costs for personnel and data center space, software and maintenance agreements, backup and disaster recovery systems, and energy to power all of this. These contributing costs are often overlooked and are soaring," said Lori Wright, vice president and general manager for Symantec Health. "Healthcare providers on average can achieve a savings of 25 to 50 percent by hosting image archives with Symantec Health."

To help all healthcare providers regain control of their burgeoning storage requirements, Symantec designed Symantec Health to leverage existing standard protocols to interact with any PACS/RIS system. Symantec Health offers secure, affordable long-term image archiving to accommodate the growing number and size of medical images. Simultaneously, Symantec Health brings transparency to the storage environment through an on-demand dashboard showing storage consumption by modality and site. "This has been eye opening to many organizations that have a much more opaque view of this today," Wright added.

Symantec Health image archiving also complements solutions from other third-party PACS vendors to augment a provider's PACS infrastructure and provide business continuity in the event of a disruption or disaster.