Dell Acquiring Medical Storage Firm InSite One

Health IT Boosts Patient Care, Safety

Dell announced Wednesday that it will buy InSite One, a cloud-based medical archiving company that helps healthcare organizations manage their data.

While details of the transaction were not disclosed, Dell executives said they are pleased to acquire InSite One's product, which helps customers reduce costs associated with long-term data storage and migration and addresses one of the biggest problems in healthcare today -- how to share images between medical professionals consulting in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. According to James Coffin, VP of Dell healthcare and life sciences, many of Dell's healthcare customers say one of their greatest concerns is managing the growing demands of both digital images and patient records.

"We are dramatically simplifying archiving and retention of clinical data, both medical images and electronic medical records. This will allow our customers to improve care and support medical innovation through the efficient use of IT, and we're doing it in a way that actually simplifies access to the information when it's needed by clinicians," Coffin said.

The combination of InSite One's cloud-based, vendor-neutral archive software and storage services with Dell's Unified Clinical Archive solution will simplify data retention and let medical professionals access and share images regardless of the technology employed, Dell executives said.

Headquartered in Wallingford, Conn., InSite One currently manages nearly 55 million clinical studies, more than 3.6 billion medical images, and supports almost 800 clinical sites. InSite One's cloud infrastructure supports all picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), data sources, and modalities. Its patented tools and services simplify the transition of medical information archiving to the cloud and address longstanding data management and retention challenges.

As Dell continues to grow its healthcare business, the company said it will take advantage of several key features of InSite One's business, including its large image databases, as well as technology that gives clinicians Web-enabled image access, indexing, and sharing of medical information across systems; data center security, reliability, and redundancy; and hosted capabilities that lower total cost of ownership.

Berk Smith, VP of Dell healthcare and life sciences services, said in a statement that InSite One's cloud technology will be a valuable tool for information exchange, which is a key component in transforming healthcare. Smith also said the acquisition will help Dell offer its healthcare customers technology that reduces costs.

"As the first company to bring cloud technology to the medical archive space, InSite One will help Dell's healthcare customers take advantage of the economics and scalability of the cloud for medical archiving and retention,"

Additionally, InSite One's data migration and recovery/backup services will also simplify the transition to the cloud for customers and ensure that information is managed safely and securely.

Both companies said the acquisition will provide healthcare customers with a cloud-based, unified medical archive solution that supports Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance and eliminates the silos of image information created when hospitals use multiple PACS.

InSite One extends Dell's Unified Clinical Archive solution and complements existing PACS environments. It combines vendor-neutral archive software with object-based storage to simplify archiving for IT staff and improves medical professionals' access to images.

"The InSite One team is thrilled to be joining the Dell team," Jim Champagne, CEO of InSite One, said in a statement. "As the industry's leading provider of healthcare IT services, Dell will give InSite One an opportunity to reach more customers and expand our impact on the healthcare industry.