Hitachi Data Systems Corp. (HDS), introduced  Hitachi Clinical Repository for healthcare providers to improve clinical decision making and resulting patient care. Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) is an information management solution that transforms raw medical data and images into meaningful information, independent of the source applications.

Leveraging the company’s data and storage management technologies, HCR creates a metadata repository based on any information system and gives healthcare providers a consolidated view of relevant patient information. As a result, healthcare organizations can increase interoperability, significantly reduce costs while improving access to data, and better utilize electronic health records (EHRs) to meet important government healthcare initiatives.

Existing healthcare facilities are faced with explosive growth of medical information and images from every clinical department. The patient data contains additional underlying data, called metadata, that is stored in a static, proprietary format inaccessible to other applications and therefore remains unutilized. Healthcare providers are under growing pressure to take full advantage of their data and the application silos the data reside in, to optimize how they make important patient care decisions.

Creating and managing a central, integrated metadata repository of patient information is an integral component to improve facility-wide data management. Unlike current Vendor Neutral Archives (VNAs) that focus only on medical images, Hitachi Clinical Repository consolidates patient data, standardizes the formats across disparate applications and provides this data to EHR and portals in a single, unified view that can then be mined and distributed centrally and securely.

“Hitachi Clinical Repository takes the concept of Medical Imaging VNAs and expands it to include the entire healthcare facility,” said Bill Burns, vice president, Health and Life Sciences, HDS. “Its unique capability is adding patient metadata to image and non-image data, at any point in the lifecycle, to restore the long-term value to this most critical class of data. By seamlessly consolidating and presenting all relevant health and business data in a single, longitudinal record, healthcare providers can now get the most comprehensive view of their patients, regardless of which information system the data resides in. HCR enables providers to be more efficient, cost effective and innovative – it truly transforms the delivery of patient care.”

HCR virtualizes image and non-image data from any information system and creates a metadata repository for healthcare providers to have a facility-wide consolidated view of all relevant patient information. It is comprised of several Hitachi storage technologies including Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), Hitachi NAS Platform, powered by BlueArc (HNAS), and Hitachi Data Discovery Suite (HDDS). HCR is a standards-based interoperability framework that accepts multiple data types, parses the data and indexes the metadata, enabling interoperability between external applications such as EHRs or clinical portals.

HDS provides data transformation service to capture appropriate data from the many information sources within an enterprise, index that data as well as its file system, application and customer metadata, and then make that data available to external sources through the platform’s API architecture. Business rules, privacy and security requirements, quality and audit assessments, governance and workflow processes can all be applied against the indexed data for further improvements to patient care.

The Hitachi Clinical Repository provides indexing and metadata analysis of more than 50 different document and 400 multi-purpose internet mail extensions (MIME) types, their content and possible different levels of information provides interoperability. It also offers reduction in waste, operational and maintenance costs while improving access to data and increasing efficiency, metadata indexing improves the organization, accessibility, discoverability and long term value of data, and physical adoption and utilization of a single longitudinal patient record through EHR and portal solutions enables enterprise adoption and utilization of EHR solutions.

“Creating and managing metadata repositories are important components for improving enterprise data management and information exploitation,” said David Floyer, CTO and co-founder, Wikibon. “HDS has incorporated its leading edge technologies into Hitachi Clinical Repository to provide a much richer metadata capture by opening and interrogating every type of object (not just standard containers) during the acquisition process. This will give clinicians improved access to information related to the patient's situation and better decision making. HCR is a model for addressing the general data management challenges within IT of extending the value of data beyond the applications that create it.”

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