LifeBridge Health Prescribes EMC Information Infrastructure

HOPKINTON, Mass., Sept. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that LifeBridge Health deployed an EMC information infrastructure to support its backup, archive and recovery strategies and drive its paperless initiative for cost-efficient patient care and streamlined IT administration in a continuously growing 24x7 environment.

Chris Panagiotopoulos, LifeBridge Health's Director of Technology, said, "We've been moving to a paperless environment to automate orders for medications, diagnostic tests and ancillary services. Having the flexibility to add storage, reallocate it from one host to another and support complete disaster recovery has been critical."

LifeBridge Health, one of the largest, most comprehensive healthcare providers in Baltimore, continually strives to optimize the management, protection and availability of information to deliver advanced, quality care and wellness services to its patients. To accomplish this, LifeBridge Health implemented an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, which advocates that mission-critical patient information is stored on the most high-performance, highly available storage for real-time access, while less-critical data is stored or archived more cost effectively.

To support its Cerner Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS), LifeBridge Health deployed an automated, policy-based image archiving solution. This solution ensures that information is rapidly accessible to physicians and that it complies with HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. Using EMC DiskXtender(R) software, a new PACS image is stored on a high- performance EMC Symmetrix(R) system and simultaneously archived onto an EMC Centera(TM) content addressed storage (CAS) system in the main data center. It is also replicated to a Centera system at a remote site, and an additional copy is stored on an offsite tape storage system. In addition, a compressed version of the image is stored on the Symmetrix system, enabling physicians to get a quick, preliminary look at patient images from their home PC, office system or mobile device via LifeBridge Health's web server.

LifeBridge Health also worked with EMC Global Services to implement a world-class business continuity strategy to protect and ensure timely access to critical patient information. To support this business continuity initiative, LifeBridge Health deployed a second, identically equipped Symmetrix system at a remote site 10 miles away. This platform uses EMC SRDF(R)/Synchronous software to continuously replicate, mirror and protect information. EMC TimeFinder(R) software further strengthens LifeBridge Health's business continuity initiatives by facilitating the read-only capabilities of Cerner Millennium clinical data for planned and unplanned downtime. Two sets of Cerner production business continuance volumes (BCVs) are automatically created using TimeFinder -- one every hour and the other every odd hour, two hours apart.

"Previously, our recovery could literally take days," said Panagiotopoulos. "Now we have two safety nets to ensure business continuity. Our production system with TimeFinder BCVs is our first line of defense. The second is our ability to quickly failover to our backup data center using SRDF. Both enable us to move business forward while giving us an opportunity to recover if necessary."

To help anticipate future storage requirements, LifeBridge Health uses EMC ControlCenter(R) storage resource management (SRM) and device management software. This solution monitors storage performance and capacity and trend usage to help improve productivity, increase performance and lower storage management costs.

"In the last few years, we've gone from five terabytes of usable data to approximately 17 terabytes," said Panagiotopoulos. "EMC ControlCenter enables us to maximize our usage today while strategically planning our storage needs for expanding our operations in the future."

About EMC

EMC Corporation is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.emc.com/.

About LifeBridge Health

LifeBridge Health is a Baltimore regional health organization that includes Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Northwest Hospital Center, Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital, Jewish Convalescent & Nursing Home, and related subsidiaries and affiliates.

EMC, ControlCenter, DiskXtender, SRDF and TimeFinder are registered trademarks, and Centera is a trademark of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact: Patrick Cooley 508-293-6583 cooley_patrick@emc.com