Hitachi Data Systems has introduced a new solution for healthcare providers to improve clinical decision making and resulting patient care.

Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) is an information management solution that transforms raw medical data and images into meaningful information, independent of the source applications.

HCR creates a metadata repository based on any information system and gives healthcare providers a consolidated view of all relevant patient information. It promises to increase interoperability, reduce costs and improve access to data, with better utlilisation of electronic health records (EHRs) .

Today’s healthcare facilities are faced with explosive growth of medical information and images from every clinical department. Most of this important patient data contains additional underlying metadata that is stored in a static, proprietary format inaccessible to other applications and therefore remains unutilised.

Healthcare providers are under growing pressure to take full advantage of their data – and the application silos the data reside in – to optimize how they make important patient care decisions. Creating and managing a central, integrated metadata repository of patient information is an integral component to improve facility-wide data management.

Hitachi Clinical Repository consolidates all patient data, standardizes the formats across disparate applications and then provides this data to EHR and portals in a single, unified view that can then be mined intelligently and distributed centrally and securely.

HCR virtualises image and non-image data from any information system and creates a metadata repository for healthcare providers to have a facility-wide consolidated view of all relevant patient information. It is comprised of several Hitachi storage technologies that accept multiple data types, parses the data and indexes the metadata, enabling interoperability between external applications such as EHRs or clinical portals.

Hitachi Data Systems provides a complete data transformation service to capture appropriate data from the many information sources within an enterprise, index that data as well as its file system, application and customer metadata, and then make that data available to external sources through the platform’s API architecture.