BridgeHead Introduces HealthStore(TM) Independent Clinical Archive

WOBURN, MA and ASHTEAD, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Oct 29, 2014) - BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data management, today announced BridgeHead HealthStore™, the first Independent Clinical Archive (ICA) for long-term storage, protection and sharing of hospital data. A modular solution built on top of the BridgeHead Healthcare Data Management (HDM) platform, BridgeHead HealthStore enables hospitals to standardize access to key elements of the patient record while simultaneously freeing them from dependence on any single system to locate the information.

Consolidating many of BridgeHead's existing capabilities behind a single management console, BridgeHead HealthStore offers standards-based integration with any clinical data source (HL7, unstructured files, DICOM and XDS). It is both application and storage independent and maintains its own meta-data to ensure content is accessible and clinically useful into the future.

With BridgeHead HealthStore, two things are achieved. Firstly, content can be transparently accessed by the originating application but is now prepared for secondary use by future applications, for example health analytics. Secondly, the data in HealthStore is held independent of the storage. This means hospitals can move to a new application without affecting their storage, or move to new storage without impacting their applications. Ideally suited to manage both new data as well as bulk import of historic data, BridgeHead HealthStore comes with BridgeHead's full suite of implementation, integration and migration services.

BridgeHead HealthStore brings the following benefits to healthcare data management:

• Enables faster clinical decisions and a more complete EPR with more efficient access to all types of data, which improves EPR or portal implementation;
• Simplifies data quality management, especially for data that is unlikely to change again;
• Allows access to patient data even if one or several primary applications are unavailable;
• Frees departmental applications (e.g. PACS) to concentrate their main activity -- managing the department -- not on being a data-warehouse;
• Streamlines non-clinical access to data (e.g. research) without impacting primary data repositories (e.g. PACS);
• Future proofs data access via standards-based architecture for easy connection to other systems in the future, especially those systems wishing to recall data from HealthStore;
• Removes constant migration headaches as new applications only need a meta data update, not the movement of the physical items;
• Provides a framework to home and secure content from applications that are being retired or taken permanently offline;
• Fully audited.
  
  

The healthcare market is acknowledging that the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) is no longer sufficient. What's needed is an ICA with the broader abilities to consolidate access to and management of all of a hospital's data. "BridgeHead's data management pedigree makes it eminently qualified to author a complete healthcare facing archive," said Tony Cotterill, Chief Product Officer at BridgeHead Software. "For the past five years, BridgeHead has developed APIs for all healthcare-specific data ingestion methods. Now BridgeHead HealthStore brings together our traditional DICOMStore, FileStore and XDS capabilities into the industry's first true ICA."

"With BridgeHead HealthStore functioning as a hospital's ICA, MEDITECH foresees the possibility to publish its own data for independent access by other applications as well as a repository, which will simplify MEDITECH's access for things like images and other clinical content, all via standards such as XDS," said John Valutkevich, Manager of Interoperability Initiatives, MEDITECH. "Initiatives like this all help MEDITECH present the Electronic Health Record more efficiently for our customers running specialty applications in the community and that is why we value the BridgeHead relationship."

Interactive Resources
Visit BridgeHead Software at RSNA2014 Booth # 2978, Nov. 30-Dec. 5 in Chicago.
Read the datasheet: BridgeHead HealthStore™ 

About BridgeHead Software
With 20 years' experience in data and storage management, and 12 years in healthcare, BridgeHead Software is trusted by over 1,000 hospitals worldwide. Today, BridgeHead Software helps healthcare facilities overcome challenges stemming from rising data volumes and increasing storage costs while delivering peace of mind around how to store, protect and share clinical and administrative information.

BridgeHead's Healthcare Data Management (HDM) solutions are designed to work with any hospital's chosen applications and storage hardware, regardless of vendor, providing greater choice, flexibility and control over the way data is managed, now and in the future. For more information, visit http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com or follow on Twitter at @BridgeHeadHDM.