Eastman Kodak Co. at HIMSS06 last month in San Diego demonstrated the newest capabilities of its scalable Carestream Information Management Solutions (IMS), which equip healthcare IT staffs to more efficiently manage information. These products help reduce expenses by providing intelligent, automated management tools and by equipping facilities with centralized management of decentralized storage systems, the company said.

The company’s Carestream IMS includes the following components: Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Hosted Information Management (HIM) and Regional Information Management (RIM). Carestream’s architecture can be scaled for small or large hospitals and medical practices or entire regional or national healthcare information systems -- using the same software framework. Since the same software architecture is featured in Kodak’s PACS, a healthcare facility that purchases the image management systems can implement enterprise-wide management of other applications and storage systems with a software upgrade, Kodak said.

Carestream RIM can extend clinical information life cycle management to an entire geographic region; and Carestream HIM offers business continuity and disaster recovery by hosting an organization’s data remotely at a secure Kodak data center. The recent hurricanes and resulting devastation have highlighted the need for secure data storage at remote locations.