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ASHTEAD, UK AND DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY – August 1, 2012 – BridgeHead Software today announced that it has joined forces with the European Centre of Expertise for the Health Care Industry EEIG to provide a unique data and storage management offering to European healthcare organisations known as the Shared Medical Archiving Solution (SMAS). SMAS is a fully managed, Cloud-based, archiving solution for all data – clinical and administrative –is independently audited by KPMG, providing healthcare organisations an added level of assurance that where their data resides is not only compliant, but will remain secure.

A number of factors make this solution innovative and unique for the healthcare industry. Firstly, unlike other offerings, SMAS enables hospitals to store, protect and share both the clinical and administrative data originating from disparate applications. Whether DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) images from radiology departments or scanned patient information, through to email or general file data such as documents and spreadsheets, the joint solution is equipped to manage the entire lifecycle of data within a hospital.

Secondly, SMAS will be fully audited end-to-end and certified by KPMG, as opposed to the more traditional approach of separately certifying only the individual elements. As a result, hospitals will not have to concern themselves with the regulatory and compliance issues normally associated with outsourcing the management of their data and can be confident that their information will remain secure.

Within the overall offering, BridgeHead’s Healthcare Data Management (HDM) Solution plays the role of managing the data between a hospital’s applications and the hardware on which the data is stored. As content is moved into the archive, the data is indexed (both meta-data and full-text indexing), making it easy for hospital staff to search for and access information, such as patient records, as and when needed. Data footprints within the archive can also be reduced through compression functionality in accordance with hospital policies. In addition, this offering can be used by healthcare organisations to facilitate a robust disaster recovery solution by using the Cloud-based archive as a secondary data centre to house copies of a hospital’s data in the event of a disaster, outage, corruption or loss.

Klaus Aulenbacher, CEO of European Centre of Expertise for the Healthcare Industry EEIG, commented, “By bringing together best–of-breed providers of technology and services, such as BridgeHead Software and KPMG, we are able to offer hospitals a unique, comprehensive solution to effectively manage and protect all of their data, whether for the purposes of deep archive and/or as a disaster recovery solution. And, by fully auditing and certifying the solution, handling all of the legal and regulatory requirements necessary when outsourcing healthcare data, it dramatically reduces risk to customers and provides peace of mind. We are delighted to be working with BridgeHead Software in leveraging their Healthcare Data Management technology as part of this solution.”

Jim Beagle, CEO and President at BridgeHead Software, added, “It’s great to be part of such a forward thinking initiative. Hospitals are increasingly battling with the challenges of managing their ever-growing healthcare data. Solutions, such as SMAS, provide a real alternative to the more traditional, in-house data management approaches, which can be costly, time consuming and resource intensive. We’re delighted to work with such an innovative organisation such as the European Centre of Expertise for the Health Care Industry EEIG and look forward to helping them extend their offerings across Europe.”

Following successful beta trials in Germany and Austria, the Cloud-based archiving solution is now being rolled out across Europe.