BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data and storage management, and MEDITECH, the leading vendor of Health Care Information Systems (HCIS), today announced that the two companies are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their business partnership. For a decade, BridgeHead Software has helped MEDITECH customers, spanning North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, to manage and protect their healthcare data.

“MEDITECH is glad to acknowledge and celebrate our 10 years' association with Bridgehead as providers of backup and archival storage products to our customers,” said Chris Anschuetz, Vice President System Technology for MEDITECH. “A relationship lasting 10 years is not something that happens by accident. Both sides have worked hard for this, but the real winner here is our customers. This has been a good partnership for all concerned, and we look forward to many more years.”

“Ten years ago, BridgeHead Software laid the foundation for this partnership when we helped MEDITECH solve its internal backup challenges,” said Tony Cotterill, CEO and President for BridgeHead Software. “Over the past decade, BridgeHead and MEDITECH have worked hand-in-hand to bring flexible, scalable and cost effective healthcare data management solutions to the MEDITECH customer base, worldwide. This relationship is very important to us and we look forward to continued close collaboration long into the future.”

BridgeHead Software’s offerings complement the MEDITECH Health Care Information System (HCIS) with back up, disaster recovery and archiving solutions that, together, provide a future proof platform to overcome rising data volumes and increasing storage costs while delivering peace of mind around the access, availability and protection of critical electronic patient data. The combined BridgeHead Software/MEDITECH solutions include:

BridgeHead Integrated Serverless Backup (ISB) which takes advantage of the "snapshot" capabilities (sometimes called clones, snap copies, or flash copies, depending on the technology) of various SANs to affect a static, image-based backup of the MEDITECH database. A dedicated backup server running BridgeHead software controls the backup schedule and communicates with MEDITECH to ensure that a quiesced, static image of the database is backed up to the tape library. One benefit of this solution is that the MEDITECH hosts do not spend CPU cycles backing up or resynching data, thus making multiple daily backups feasible.

BridgeHead Integrated Disaster Recovery (IDR) which extends the functionality of ISB to store point-in-time database copies on disk. These database images can be created at frequent intervals throughout the day and then stored for future retrieval. The images may be stored on your production SAN, or you may choose to send images to a remote SAN for greater security.

BridgeHead FileStore EHR™ for MEDITECH SCA is a policy-based storage management system for file data. It automatically identifies and repositions data that hasn’t been accessed to the most appropriate alternative storage devices. It reduces the need for expensive tier-1 storage and simplifies online data management by eliminating the need to repeatedly back up unchanging data.

To date, BridgeHead ISB/IDR and FileStore EHR support all MEDITECH certified storage platforms, which currently include platforms from IBM, HP and EMC. Because BridgeHead is storage agnostic, it gives MEDITECH customers the freedom to use whatever combination of MEDITECH certified storage array, disk-based backup or tape most efficient and cost effective for their hospital.

If you would like to read a more detailed account of the history between MEDITECH and BridgeHead Software, please click the following link: http://www.bridgeheadsoftware.com/company/news_articles/news_
meditech_and_bridgehead_software_celebrate_10_years_of_backup_success/