Carestream to host French health data

The French Ministry of Health and Sports has named Carestream Health as an approved host for personal health data, the first medical imaging company to receive accreditation.

The Carestream Health Managed Service portfolio fully complies with the Health Data Security and Confidentiality Reference Table published by the newly created Agency for Shared Information Systems in healthcare?Health ASIP? responsible for organising healthcare collaboration in France.

Carestream Health has rigorously demonstrated conformance against the table, one of the most stringent in Europe, underlining the reliable performance of its technologies, the professionalism of its operations and the security of its processes in the arena of data hosting services.

“This approval is an important stepping stone in the development of our Carestream eHealth Managed Services in France,” said Hélène Millara-Deron, president of Carestream Health France.

“It strengthens our leadership in cloud computing and as one of the first medical imaging companies to receive accreditation, puts Carestream Health at the forefront of medical data hosting with our vendor-neutral solution.”

A number of healthcare organisations in France already use Carestream’s eHealth cloud infrastructure to support a variety of workflows, from emergency teleradiology to hospital cross reading and long term archiving.

One Client is Imadis, a teleradiology company based in Lyon, which was established with the aim of solving the lack of radiologist resources experienced by public hospitals at night and during weekends.

The company uses the Carestream Health cloud to ensure efficient and secure data transfer from customer sites to their reading centre, with a dedicated workflow exactly tuned to their needs. Conformance to French legal requirements and best practice is a key issue.

Another is the Centre Hospitalier Régional d’Orléans, a large regional hospital representing approximately 270,000 annual exams and where Carestream Health provides secure eHealth Archive Services.

“Moving to a service model enables the hospital to get rid of the issues of long term archiving and technology obsolescence management,” said Guillaume Laurent, chief information officer at the hospital. “I prefer to have my people focused on application management and understanding users’ requirements, than handling long term data management issues. This requires specific expertise that we do not have.”

“Archiving in service mode is innovative and relevant and we were also reassured by the success of regional projects [undertaken by Carestream Health] such as the National PACS Project in Scotland,” added Mr Laurent.

The Carestream eHealth Managed Services (eMS) cloud has reached one billion stored images worldwide, representing more than one petabyte of data. The company currently operates from eight data centres in five countries throughout Europe and North America, with more planned to open shortly in Japan and Argentina.

This vendor-neutral infrastructure virtualises enterprise storage and provides on demand delivery of images and data to locations throughout the enterprise, regardless of where the information is physically stored or where it originated.