White Paper: Understanding And Controlling Medical Imaging Archiving Return On Investment

With new data-intensive modalities and the growth of filmless imaging overall, today the typical healthcare facility's volume of digital imaging data is expanding exponentially. A key challenge to most medical facilities in a PACS environment is managing these storage costs and generating a sound return on investment (ROI) for an image archive. This white paper will discuss the range of factors that make up ROI for a medical imaging archive, including the costs and benefits of various archiving hardware, architectures and management strategies. It also focuses on the economic implications of implementing a medical archive in-house compared to out-sourcing storage through a storage service provider (SSP).

While a number of years ago the hard costs of storage media were the most significant archiving expense, with today's advanced storage management strategies, broader range of media and low storage media prices, calculating ROI has become far more complex. Archiving expenditures, and therefore ROI, extend well beyond hardware to include a full range of less visible soft costs that affect a facility's productivity and profitability. Healthcare IT professionals and others involved in decisions about archive management must be aware of these considerations to make well-informed decisions about how to manage this function responsibly at their facilities.