Security Concept

Put your trust in competence and experience

Telepaxx, which has been operating the e-pacs storage service since 1996, can rely on a unique reservoir of operating experience in the external archiving of patient-related medical data. The following statistics speak for themselves.

• More than 100 clients with over 20,000 beds
• More than 500,000,000 archived images
• Online capacity of nearly 4,000 TB in the three e-pacs Storage Centers
• Concern-wide archiving for numerous large hospital operators
• Twelve mammography screening units
• Numerous radiological praxis associations

Trust is good, but monitoring is better – legal compliance is assured by data-protection certifications

As the operator of Germany’s first medical archive, Telepaxx invited independent technical and legal experts to certify that the e-pacs Storage Service indeed complies with data-protection requirements. And Telepaxx annually submits to voluntary re-certifications. This is significant in two respects: firstly, it guarantees legal conformity with the complex German data-protection laws of the federal government and the several states; secondly, annual re-certification procedures ensure that the enciphering technology is always in accord with the state of the art. e-pacs has been awarded the following data-protection certifications:  

• Datenschutzgütesiegel des unabhängigen Landeszentrums für Datenschutz in Kiel
• EuroPriSe – the European Privacy Seal

Security for Your Investments

Thanks to its conception as a Dicom long-term archive, e-pacs offers a doubled abstraction layer between PACS and storage technology. This gives clients a very high degree of autonomy and independence.
Independence from storage technology and thus avoidance of migration labor, which is difficult to plan. The length of time during which radiological data must be stored (10 to 30 years) is much longer than the length of time that a storage technology remains reasonably usable (circa five years). This means that if one operates one’s own long-term archive, one is repeatedly forced to undertake large-scale data migrations, and the costs of such migrations are difficult to anticipate. e-pacs solves this problem through continual, asynchronous and ongoing migrations in the e-pacs Storage Center. These migrations are free of charge to the client and are automatically conducted in the e-pacs Storage Center.
Independence of the PACS applications through the implementation of a Dicom long-term archive. Through the use of this global standard, PACS application changes are possible without the need for data migration. 
 

Secure Operating Environment

Every e-pacs Storage Center is equipped with the necessary infrastructure for the secure long-term archiving of medical data:

• F90+ security cell
• Automatic fire-extinguishing system
• Early fire-detection system
• Protected and controlled access
• Transaction-secured doubled storage of data
• Online replication of the database
• Redundantly equipped with all important components
• Heated and air conditioned
• Interruption-free power supply
• Fallback lines for telecommunication

The needs for data availability undergo enormous changes over the course of time

During Treatment of the Patient

The ability to access, speedily and whenever needed, all patient-related medical data that are necessary for the treatment of the patient is of primary importance from a physician’s viewpoint. In modern medicine, diagnostic image data undoubtedly belong to this category. That’s why PACS solutions for the management of image data are usually equipped with a failure-protected configuration which can keep medical operations running under almost any conditions. But storage solutions of this kind are very costly: as a general rule, data can be kept in a highly accessible state only for a limited period of time. Smaller institutions often don’t have a sufficiently large budget to finance a failure-protected solution of this sort. In both instances, the e-pacs Storage Service can increase the availability of data.

In the case of a highly accessible PACS configuration, the e-pacs department server (which is installed on the client’s premises) extends the length of time during which the data can be accessed with GB speed; the interval of rapid accessibility is typically lengthened by several years. In addition, in the highly unlikely event of a failure of the entire PACS, all images can continue to be accessed from selected workplaces.

For clients who do not have a highly accessible PACS configuration, the e-pacs department server provides failure-secured capability, which comes into play if and when the PACS server fails.
In both cases, usage of the e-pacs Storage Service lengthens the duration of the interval during which the data are rapidly accessible and minimizes both the likelihood and the consequences of the non-availability of medical image data. e-pacs thus optimally supports the process of caring for patients.
 

The change from one storage technology to the next (after a maximum of five years)

Many years of experience have shown that storage technologies typically remain usable for circa five years. This is a significantly briefer span of time than is required by legal regulations, which typically specify that data must remain in storage between 10 and 30 years. For an institution that operates its own archiving system, this means that potentially labor-intensive data migrations at cyclically recurring intervals are unavoidable. The e-pacs Storage Service eliminates this problem because the data migration is conducted automatically and asynchronously in the e-pacs Storage Center.

Usage of the e-pacs Storage Service guarantees that the data remain available to the client over the long term. It also relieves the client of the task of migrating data onto new storage systems. The data are continually accessible online, and migration of the data in the e-pacs Storage Center occurs at no cost to the client.
 

The change to the PACS application

Under long-term aspects of ten or more years, changing the currently used PACS application with or without changing the manufacturer ought to be included in the planning. Even though all of the commonly used PACS solutions support Dicom, they internally assign the Dicom files to proprietary directory trees. This necessitates a more or less labor-intensive data migration when it becomes necessary to change to a new application, and the costs of this migration are difficult to anticipate. The minimum expenditure of labor is that each image must at least once be read, transmitted and assigned to a new storage place. Especially if the change is from one manufacturer’s system to another manufacturer’s system, this process is generally not fully automatically possible: instead, it involves a considerable amount of manual labor (i.e. high personnel expenses).
The situation is entirely different when e-pacs is used as a Dicom long-term archive. Because e-pacs is implemented as Dicom Deep Storage, the new PACS application can be simply linked to e-pacs without migration and all data can be retrieved on demand without requiring the migration of e-pacs. This aspect is increasingly significant when enormous volumes of data with low access rates are involved because the client gains independence and the ability to plan in the following areas:

• Storage technology
• PACS application 
• Investment security 
• Overall operating costs, including subsequent technology costs (e.g. migrations)