BridgeHead & NetApp collaborate

BridgeHead Software has announced its membership in the NetApp Alliance Partner Program. The initiative arose following agreement by both companies of their synergies within the healthcare space. BridgeHead and NetApp collaborate to enable hospitals to store, protect and share their most valuable asset, their data, for the betterment of patient care. Our joint solutions can provide healthcare organizations with a full, end-to-end suite of data management and storage capabilities. These include, but are not limited to, clinical and administrative data archiving, information lifecycle management (ILM), comprehensive data protection and security, and a range of storage hardware and devices suitable for all environments and budgets.

“Partnering with BridgeHead Software enables us to offer customers a truly integrated solution that provides the best aspects of BridgeHead’s data management abilities with NetApp’s storage efficiencies,” said Dave Nesvisky, senior director of NetApp Healthcare. “The agility and efficiency we offer together leads to greater productivity and ROI, enabling healthcare organizations to focus on patient care.”

Playing to each vendor’s strengths, BridgeHead Software will provide its Healthcare Data Management (HDM) Solution. This will enable hospitals to efficiently manage all of their systems and data, within one environment. BridgeHead’s HDM offers a VNA for DICOM images and a compatible archive for non-DICOM files, featuring a rich policy engine used for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), and controlling features like encryption and compression. BridgeHead’s HDM also offers comprehensive protection of all manner of data found within healthcare environments, from medical images, scanned patient documents, and patient notes, through to email, PDFs and other office type files. Through its advanced backup and disaster recovery capabilities, in conjunction with its archiving functionality and seamless integration with the NetApp® storage portfolio, BridgeHead can provide a complete data protection solution for healthcare environments.

NetApp enables healthcare organizations to deploy an agile data infrastructure that offers intelligent data management, non-disruptive operations, and infinite scalability. Healthcare customers’ data infrastructure must be efficient and feature application-aware software tools to allow IT professionals to immediately respond to rapidly changing healthcare requirements. Customers need non-disruptive operations and always-on data accessibility, a critical factor in the 24x7 business of healthcare. Today’s customers also are growing without limits. In order to keep ahead of the exponential data growth that comes with widespread adoption of EHR and PACS, they must have scalability.

“Our joint Medical Archive, combining BridgeHead’s HDM Solution and NetApp’s extensive range of storage devices, offers a best-in-class data management environment suitable for hospitals, both large and small. The fact that NetApp’s product line, from basic NAS devices through to its advanced FlexPod® solutions, utilize a common operating system means that our Medical Archive can scale from meeting the needs of a specific department, such as providing a vendor neutral archive (VNA) for radiology, through to providing an Enterprise-wide archive for the [entire] hospital,” explains Tony Cotterill, Chief Product Officer and Founder of BridgeHead Software.

He continues, “Working with NetApp has been an excellent experience; interestingly, our respective cultures are very similar. And though NetApp is a large company, they have the agility of a small organization. We have established a ‘peer-to-peer’ style relationship, between our engineering teams, that has meant a high degree of focus, productivity and, ultimately, a great solution for our customers.”

Initially, the joint BridgeHead and NetApp offering will largely target IT decision makers within hospitals in North America and Europe where there are already talks with a number of healthcare organizations. Over time, the geographical coverage is likely to expand further.

“In partnering with NetApp, we are able to offer our customers additional choice and flexibility in terms of the devices available for the storage of their healthcare data. NetApp is a rapidly growing storage vendor that has a significant footprint in healthcare. So, as you might expect, we already share a lot of accounts. However, this partnership now allows us to work closely together with our joint customers at a much more strategic level,” comments Jim Beagle, CEO of BridgeHead Software.

He continues, “NetApp has done a fantastic job of creating a reputable channel community that allows them to have a wide reach in the healthcare market. BridgeHead is really excited to work with both NetApp and their business partners to deliver high- quality solutions to hospitals around the world.”

Recently, BridgeHead Software, NetApp and leading healthcare consultant Joe Marion, participated in a webinar entitled, “How to more effectively manage all types of medical data.” If you’re interested in learning how a better approach to VNA can help you to bridge the gap to Hospital Data Availability, the webinar is available on demand.