Hospitalverband Kempten-Oberallgäu gGmbH

To the digital future in less than two months

Kempten-Oberallgäu hospital association combines backup and revision-proof archives in the Silent Brick system

The Oberallgäu administrative district is the southernmost district in Germany and a popular vacation region for hikers, cyclists and nature lovers. The independent city of Kempten is located in the center of this administrative district. For medical care in the region, there are hospitals in Oberstdorf, Sonthofen, Immenstadt and Kempten that have been working together under the joint banner of the Kempten-Oberallgäu Hospital Association since April 2010. With around 3,000 employees, this hospital alliance is one of the largest employers in the region. Every year, 225,000 patients are cared for. Motivated and highly qualified employees thus guarantee the close-to-home medical care of the population. Shareholders are the city of Kempten and the administrative district of Oberallgäu. The hospital alliance offers medical care from basic and standard care to the medical highs of current science. The implementation of HYDMedia, a comprehensive Enterprise Content Management system for hospitals from AGFA Healthcare, required a restructuring of data storage. The IT department chose FAST LTA’s Silent Brick system because it offered an uncomplicated and scalable solution for the revision-proof data storage required on WORM media. At the same time, the existing backup solution was replaced with Veeam.

The association of the hospitals in the alliance has brought a number of advantages. For example, the Kempten-Allgäu hospital association under the public administration of Sana-Management has been able to look back on positive results for several years. For the overall IT infrastructure, the department of Joachim Schmitt, head of ICT, is responsible. The area of data storage is managed from Benjamin Reil as application manager for clinical information systems. The four sites use a unified network connected via radio transmitters. Almost all applications are hosted at the Kempten location where two server rooms are available. In addition, there is another server room at the Immenstadt location. The data include information for the patients’ therapies, which are largely digital in the hospital information system, the radiology information system, the PACS (archiving of medical images), practice administration systems and about 50 medical applications. The data are stored on primary storage and partly on servers, both virtual and physical. The current data volume is 200 Terabytes. Per month this grows by about 1 Terabyte with a strongly increasing trend. Secondary storage for backup and archiving to date has mainly been on a tape library with 40 LTO6 tapes. Revision-proof archiving has only taken place externally for the scanned patient records.

Revision-proof archiving and AGFA HYDMedia require new solutions

However, since revision-proof archiving became increasingly important due to changed regulations and the performance of the tape drives was no longer sufficient for the growing data volumes, Joachim Schmitt and Benjamin Reil decided for archiving and

backup new ways to go. In addition, the board decided to purchase a modern content management system. With AGFA HYDMedia, all patient data must be managed digitally. Until now, the hospital association was already using AGFA ORBIS, a solution for controlling complex hospital processes. With the addition by the content management system, digitization is taken a big step forward. “With the merging of ORBIS databases, we were faced with the task of making the existing archiving systems centrally available in the shortest possible time.” says Head of ICT Joachim Schmitt. Soon they came to FAST LTA’s solutions, because when searching for an optimal system, the Munich-based company was named by AGFA as a certified provider for data backup and archiving. References from hospitals such as the WaldburgZeil clinics and the Oberschwaben Clinic led to a clear choice for FAST LTA. The fact that their solutions are also used in more than half of all hospitals in Germany was an additional reason for this decision. For the backup solution, they chose Veeam’s software, which also works perfectly with the Silent Brick system and is certified.