Los Angeles — Dell Inc., The Round Rock, Texas-based company on Monday announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft to deliver a new cloud-based services that will make it easier for healthcare providers to access and share patient information stored in electronic health records and picture archiving and communications systems, which will improve healthcare efficiency from the point of care to the data center and business office.
According to the company, the new cloud services, which were introduced Monday at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2011 conference in Orlando, indicates the next phase in Dell’s strategy to help healthcare providers manage information in data centers, physicians’ offices and other points of care.
The subscription-based services are designed for hospitals and physician to concentrate less on managing information while freeing them to improve patient care and to maximize reimbursements.
“Dell is delivering the integrated solutions that bridges gaps in the marketplace and information gaps in our healthcare system,” said Berk Smith, Dell’s vice president of Healthcare and Life Sciences Services, in a statement. “We are providing innovative solutions through innovative delivery. The cloud provides the infrastructure that makes solutions-as-a-service possible so that healthcare organizations and care providers focus on how to best use patient information, not how to manage it.”
Dell has been concentrating on “the dramatic increase of data that is happening inside of healthcare organizations,” and assisting them handle it in the most efficient way, Jamie Coffin, VP of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, said in a staement.
The new cloud services reflects Dell’s pursuit to transform its business strategy from being a provider of hardware to a company that offers a full range of products and services to the healthcare sector, Coffin said. To do this, the company has hired 300 clinicians, doctors and nurses who work with healthcare customers to assess their business problems, he said.
Dell will be providing medical archiving-as-a-service as part of its private cloud package. With the medical imaging industry geared up to reach an approximate data size of 2.6 million terabytes by 2014, according to ESG Research, Dell says its service reduces data storage and retention costs and can free up resources.
Among the cloud-based services Dell announced are:
Dell’s Unified Clinical Archiving solution is now available through the private cloud with Dell’s recent acquisition of medical archiving cloud leader InSite One. The InSite One technology lets healthcare providers store information in a vendor neutral archive, enabling them to overcome the silos created when hospitals and hospital networks use multiple clinical applications.
For another service, Dell is collaborating with long time partner Microsoft to provide a subscription-based analytics service, which will also incorporate 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.
Moreover, it will also combine Microsoft’s Amalga, a health intelligence platform, with Dell’s cloud infrastructure and expertise in informatics, analytics and consulting services. This is a particularly significant announcement as it marks the first time the Amalga platform will be available 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 private cloud and provides technical and application support, maintenance and disaster recovery.
Furthermore, the service empowers hospitals with a quality indicator system that goes beyond what the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) requires. The system tracks and evaluates compliance against quality measures throughout a patient’s hospital stay. It also creates quality-of-care information required by CMS for maximum reimbursement.
“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, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in a statement.
“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.”
“What we are really attempting to do is formulate a way to build secure and private clouds for our customers that enables us to deliver both applications and services across the cloud and that also takes into account the kind of security and privacy issues that hospitals have to worry about in healthcare such as HIPAA compliance,” Coffin said.