Case Study: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center achieves enterprise imaging continuity and scalable long-term archiving with IBM

Leading children’s hospital shares its recipe for an enterprise imaging strategy

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, a 600‑bed academic pediatric hospital, faced limited long‑term image storage, no true disaster‑recovery for full‑fidelity images, and lack of documentation for point‑of‑care ultrasound studies that prevented billing. To solve these problems the hospital partnered with IBM (Merge Healthcare), deploying iConnect® Enterprise Archive, iConnect® Access and Merge PACS™ to implement an enterprise imaging strategy.

IBM (Merge Healthcare) implemented an enterprise archive with off‑site, hardware‑replicated disaster recovery and automatic reconciliation, provided an intelligent DICOM pathway for referrers, and integrated PACS workflows across departments. As a result CCHMC achieved true business continuance, extended long‑term storage beyond radiology into cardiology and point‑of‑care ultrasound (enabling billing of previously unbilled studies), and now ingests and automatically archives more than 30,000 external studies annually while maintaining smooth integration with other vendor systems.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Alex J Towbin

MD