Sentara Centralizes Storage, Cuts Costs With Enterprise Imaging

By Adam Blair

Enterprise imaging platform addresses explosive growth in digital image volumes.

Healthcare institutions struggle with the pros and cons of digital image management on a large scale and for high stakes. One issue is that although image storage doesn’t take up actual physical real estate and is relatively inexpensive, there’s a temptation to store, and keep indefinitely, every image from every patient encounter in every department.

Trent Conwell, director of IT for Sentara Healthcare, calls it the “out of sight, out of mind” problem, and it presents a number of challenges. In addition to increasing storage costs, from an IT perspective, “the more images you include in your archive, the slower and more complicated the processes of moving any individual image back and forth become,” says Conwell.