KERN-Katholische Einrichtungen Ruhrgebiet Nord GmbH
Digital archiving strategy for a rapidly growing healthcare and social services organization
5.0
★★★★★
GDPR-compliant archiving
Customers worldwide
ISV applications
Years of experience
The hardware-based archiving solution used until then had become outdated and could no longer meet the requirements of the hospital IT department. The IT managers therefore began searching for an archiving solution that offered audit compliance, high availability, and cost efficiency with minimal effort.
Success at a Glance
Central, audit-compliant archiving for DMS and PACS data
High scalability and flexibility for rapidly growing data volumes
Managed storage relieves the internal IT department and ensures high availability and security
Stable and fail-safe archiving system to ensure patient care, even in HIS emergency scenarios
Flexible combination of iCAS Classic and iCAS FS for different requirements
Thorsten Seidel
Head of IT Project Management Staff Unit, KERN
“For us, iTernity is not the price-performance winner, but the performance-price winner. The direct line to the manufacturer and the high system availability make the difference for us.”
KERN: Competent. Professional. Simply human.
The Organization at a Glance
Katholische Einrichtungen Ruhrgebiet Nord GmbH (KERN) is a strong and continuously growing network of Catholic institutions for medicine, care, and education in the Ruhr region. KERN currently employs approximately 7,500 professionals at around 40 locations. Many of the locations are closely linked to the development of industry and mining in the region and represent the social work and social-charitable responsibility of Catholic parishes past and present. The service network is one of the largest employers in the region.
- Company: KERN-Katholische Einrichtungen Ruhrgebiet Nord GmbH
- Industry: Healthcare
- Employees: 7,500 in the entire network
- Medical locations: 11 hospitals and over 60 clinics with a total of approximately 2,500 beds
Consolidation and Digitalization within the Network
In the course of several mergers and acquisitions within the KERN healthcare network, including the merger of St. Augustinus Gelsenkirchen GmbH and Katholisches Klinikum Ruhrgebiet Nord GmbH in 2023, the goal was to consolidate IT infrastructures and digitalize processes. A central challenge was to integrate different system landscapes, particularly in the medical sector, and create both technical and economic synergies.
The digital archiving of sensitive health data posed high requirements for security, uniformity, and long-term availability due to the variety of PACS and DMS systems in use. The goal was to establish a central, scalable archiving platform that meets the regulatory requirements of the healthcare and social services sector.
As early as 2019, KERN decided in the context of a DMS tender to use our middleware iCAS Classic to replace an outdated hardware-based archiving solution. The software-defined, hardware-independent solution could be flexibly integrated into the existing infrastructure and easily expanded.
With further mergers and rapidly growing data volumes, particularly in the area of diagnostic imaging, a highly available central archiving solution became necessary. Based on positive experiences, the decision was made to implement the managed storage solution iCAS FS, which relieves IT staff through high scalability, a high level of data security, and the managed services approach, while meeting increasing operational and security-related requirements.
Requirements for the Storage Solution
Thorsten Seidel
Head of IT Project Management Staff Unit, KERN
“In an environment with increasing skilled labor shortages, the managed storage service is a real asset for us.
We can focus on our core tasks.”
Benefits and Next Steps
- System availability and security: The archiving systems operate stably and efficiently with minimal administrative effort.
- Scalability: iCAS FS can be flexibly expanded and thus supports the continuous expansion of the archive.
- Managed Storage: Operation by iTernity relieves the internal IT department despite growing complexity and skilled labor shortages.
- Compliance and future-proofing: The solution meets all legal archiving requirements and enables the secure, long-term retention of medical and commercial data with retention periods of up to 30 years.
- Ransomware protection: iCAS FS protects sensitive health data through a hardened architecture without administrator access on the customer side, as well as through WORM storage and retention management, which secure data immutably.
KERN plans to continuously expand archiving with iTernity. In addition to new applications from the DMS environment, the focus is on the centralized PACS system. The archived electronic patient record also serves as a fallback concept for the HIS in the event of potential cyberattacks—an important strategic aspect in times of growing threat scenarios.
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