Dell Healthcare’s Unified Clinical Archive (UCA) is designed to be a data management and archiving solution that makes every diagnostic image for a patient available from one device at the point of patient care. This integrated and secure image management platform is now enhanced by the recent alliance between Dell Healthcare’s UCA and Apollo EPMM® (Enterprise Patient Media Manager), which complements the diagnostic capabilities incorporated into Dell’s UCA.
Dell’s health care strategy unifies different complementary components within their UCA to address four major areas of data management: on-premise storage and systems (Dell’s hardware), cloud-based archiving (InSite One), relationships with various vendor neutral archives (VNAs), and workflow management between the multiple specialties across the health care enterprise. This last component is where Apollo EPMM comes in.
“Apollo EPMM is really a new product category,” said Mark Newburger, Apollo CEO. “It provides the ability to manage the acquisition, use, and delivery of clinical media to specialists and general practitioners where that information is needed throughout the clinical process. The easiest way to think about it is the same way a radiology PACS is to a RIS, we are to the EMR.”
Apollo EPMM emerged from a 2-year collaboration with Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. Starting off in 2007 as an Apollo pathology PACS customer, the hospital needed a secure clinical image management solution for other media-intensive specialties (dermatology, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, plastic surgery), which resulted in the development and implementation in 2010 of a universal solution that was versatile enough to be expanded to 43 specialties within the institution.
Mark Newburger, CEO, Apollo
The goal of Apollo EPMM is to manage all the different media coming in from across the hospital. In doing so, Newburger describes three major challenges that their platform is designed to address: “The first thing is that we are dealing with siloed information across the health care continuum, with all the specialty information, and patient information that is part of the medical record that sits in many different clinical systems. Because you have disjointed systems across the health care landscape, it’s difficult for all of these systems to communicate to each other. We are the first offering that you could put in that will work with all the systems that you already have in place, your legacy systems, and will manage all your clinical media across the entire enterprise.”
The second challenge that the solution addresses is privacy and security concerns—that is, creating access to the information while keeping it secure and following the privacy rules. Related to this is the third challenge of managing the clinical use of outside cameras in health care institutions, particularly smartphones. “The onslaught of smartphones and tablets into the institution needs to be managed in a HIPAA compliant form, and we all have to follow several other regulations to protect privacy and keep the information secure while providing appropriate access to support the clinical process,” Newburger said. “The neat thing about Apollo EPMM is that we already have [a system] in place because of what we do for other cameras that have the potential to walk off site and for other devices that are portable. We have had the entire back end not only developed but in place and in use in multiple sites over the last 2 years. And we have just come out at HIMSS with native apps for both the iOS and Android platforms to actually control the cameras built into the smartphones.
“Adding Apollo EPMM to Dell’s UCA will enable Dell to provide the most comprehensive and secure enterprise-wide imaging solution available in the market today. The solution builds on familiar systems already used by providers and expedites collaborative care, reducing study duplication while saving customers money,” Newburger said.
Dell will be offering EPMM as both an on-the-premises solution, as well as a cloud solution, benefiting existing and future Apollo customers. “So we will now be able to have this as a software service offering that we can deliver to our customers in a fully hosted environment.”
