Maine Announces Nation's First Statewide Medical Image Archive

Maine's health information exchange (HIE) today announced it is piloting what is said to be the nation's first statewide medical imaging archive, giving physicians access to patient X-rays, MRIs and other images regardless of their location.

Maine's statewide exchange, HealthInfoNet, currently serves a million of the state's 1.3 million residents in sharing some form of electronic medical record (EMR) information between healthcare providers. The new medical imagery archive will be hosted on a separate public cloud infrastructure, provided by Dell.

Todd Rogow, director of information technology at Maine's HealthInfoNet, said the five-month pilot will involve about 200TB of storage. Each year, Maine healthcare providers produce 1.8 million medical images, which represent 45TB of data. The images include X-rays, CT scans, MRIs and mammograms...