Overview
A comprehensive solution for archiving and storing medical information
Now more than ever, hospital information systems need flexible and high capacity data storage solutions for their medical data. As modalities become more sophisticated, large-sized data, such as medical images, require advanced storage management solutions to ensure that patient data is securely protected and available on a continuous basis. MCM, the IBM Medical Content Manager, is a storage management system for medical content that requires long-term management and archiving.
This comprehensive solution is based on an open and distributed architecture that provides secure, scalable, fault-tolerant, flexible data storage solutions for OEMs, service providers, and healthcare institutions. The solution offers frictionless access to medical information, including media-rich objects such as images, sound, radiograms, video, and text.
MCM is an integrated next generation system that stores and archives digital images and patient data using IBM Content Manager and Tivoli Storage Manager. The system features digital media saved on local attached disks, ESS Shark, RAID, LTO, or other long lasting digital storage media.
Today's advanced medical technologies require efficient performance and dependable storage of clinical medical data. MCM provides 24x7 availability, with a high degree of reliability, ensuring that all images are preserved, even in the event of system failure.
MCM employs DICOM, the prevailing standard in the radiology/cardiology domains, to facilitate interoperability with existing PACS systems and modalities, and offer long-term storage that easily interfaces with any PACS system.
MCM is essential for Healthcare Information Systems, such as Electronic Patient Records, Radiology Information Systems and others, or for stand-alone research archives, education, drug development, and clinical trials. A typical deployment situation is depicted below:
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Centralized archive serving multiple PACS and other, possibly external, clinical systems
Advanced features
- Administration - Web-based administration and monitoring.
- Autonomous management - supports policy-based storage management with domain-specific understanding of the medical imaging semantics, simplifying the administrator's chore.
- Certification - handled by IBM via IBM Content Manager, all in a single certification effort.
- Component-based architecture - offers a high degree of distribution.
- Hierarchical storage management - based on the IBM Content Manager.
- Medical archive services - can be used by ASPs to provide archival services for multiple hospitals and organizations.
- Multi-platform - MCM enables the adaptation to multiple platforms from Windows and various flavors of Linux and Unix.
- High Availability - MCM can utilize high availability platforms such as such as, IBM AIX with High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP), Sun's Solaris Operating Environment with SUN Cluster V3.1, and Microsoft Windows 2003 with Microsoft Cluster Server.
- Scalability - MCM can scale both vertically and horizontally based on IBM Content Manager and Websphere Application Server.
- Open system - provides standard compliant interfaces with other systems. Standards include DICOM and HL7 on the front end and support for most storage devices at the back end, using Tivoli Storage Management.
- Privacy and security - supports fine grained ACL-based access to medical objects using IBM Content Manager security model.
- Vendor independence - supports all data sources regardless of vendor and modality manufacture; also suitable for migration between systems.
- Compliance - MCM provides a DICOM conformance statement, an IHE statement, is HIPAA compliant and Grid ready.
- Mobile enablement - users and administrators can access MCM from mobile devices. The picture below shows a view of a DICOM image stored in MCM using a hand-held device.
- Transformation/Curation infrastructure - MCM spurs an elaborated support for transformation and curation of both inbound and outbound objects, allowing fixing nonstandard values, transforming terminology, tagging objects with custom tags etc.