A clinical archiving system enables organisations in the healthcare industry to apply best practice data management to clinical data, says data protection and information management company Commvault CEO Robert Hammer.

The Commvault Clinical Archive enables centralised information management by decommissioning legacy picture archiving and communication system (PACS) solutions into a single data management platform.

Data is extracted from a legacy PACS in its original format, normalised and migrated into the clinical archive in a standard format for interoperability, and then stored for future use. This ensures that legacy studies are accessible to new PACS solutions and available for bulk migration.

Commvault Clinical Archive is a solution developed in partnership with data migration and storage services company Laitek, following Commvault’s investment in Laitek.

“Hospitals and healthcare providers aim to modernise the way healthcare organisations manage, migrate and share clinical data. The solution can address data management in the clinical and business sides of healthcare using a single platform,” he says.

The solution is based on the Commvault Data Platform and Laitek’s Semperdata platform. It allows for data migration and easy clinical data management for healthcare providers. Hospitals and healthcare providers can, therefore, break down data silos, reduce storage costs and complexity, share data better and eliminate costs to maintain and support legacy applications.

The archive is a vendor-neutral repository for all clinical information, similar to traditional virtual network-attached storage, so the platform supports a full range of cloud, on-premise, hybrid, physical and virtual environments to suit each healthcare organisation’s business and patient-care requirements, explains Hammer.

“International Data Corporation (IDC) research shows that replacing a legacy PACS is a priority among healthcare information technology administrators, owing to the high total cost of ownership and the proprietary and siloed nature of these systems, especially as new types of unstructured content, other than medical images, like scanned documents, photos and videos, proliferate across the enterprise,” says IDC Health Insights research director Judy Hanover.