EMC Information Infrastructure Cornerstone of National Patient Record Archive

HOPKINTON, Mass. - March 17, 2008 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, announced today that the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) has selected an EMC® information infrastructure solution to build one of the world’s first centralized national patient record archive to keep the most essential digital information protected, secure and continuously available.  With 300,000 user licenses, the end-to-end architecture consisting of EMC Documentum®, EMC Symmetrix® and EMC Centera® provides all critical information management solutions, including content management, storage and archiving, in an architecture designed to support extremely large data volumes.   

The EMC Documentum platform will manage all content on the vast eHealth system. Patient and prescription data will be stored on several high-end Symmetrix storage systems and archived on Centera content addressed storage systems.  The end-to-end combination of platform, software and services is designed to ensure significant system scalability needed for optimum patient care delivery – the system is estimated to reach 500 petabytes in the next decade.

The new “KanTa” archiving system, valued at approximately 20 million euros, will serve as many as 300,000 professionals within the Finnish public healthcare and pharmacies, as well as private medical clinics.  Throughout 2008, the system will provide an electronic prescription service, followed by the completion of a comprehensive patient record and image archive in 2009. By streamlining the information management processes of the entire healthcare sector, the system is predicted to improve clinical productivity while generating major financial savings.

“The new unified national patient record archive, based on EMC technology, will provide the entire healthcare sector with radically more efficient operational models.  As physicians are able to have access to all patient information regardless of where previous treatment has taken place - based on an agreement with the patient - the entire national healthcare system should benefit from this streamlined process.  The Finnish citizens will benefit from a single online information source, which will provide them with an unforeseen opportunity to participate and influence their personal medical care,” said Markku Suominen, Chief Information Officer at KELA.

In addition to professional healthcare users, KanTa will provide all the 5.3 million Finnish citizens with access to information concerning their personal medical information.  Citizens will be able to ensure the protection of their personal data by limiting the type of data displayed on their medical profiles.  The centralized KanTa record archive, complete with the “citizen view” option, is first of its kind in the world.  Together with the electronic prescription service, the feature will provide a new level of patient security further enabling patient information confidentiality.  Coupled with the sheer data volume the system stores and operates, it will quickly become the largest database in Finland.

The Social Insurance Institution of Finland will have separate environments for production, test and development, which makes the system extremely reliable and robust while providing more efficient communications and streamlined operational practices for the entire healthcare sector in Finland.  In addition, the scalable and secure storage and archiving technology provided by Symmetrix and Centera systems eliminate the need to perform backups of the KanTa system on tape.  All data will be stored and archived on disk to further improve healthcare information high availability.

“The EMC information infrastructure is designed to integrate content management seamlessly with robust storage and archiving solutions to form the cornerstone of the national eHealth patient record archive,” said Yves Mahieu, EMEA Director Healthcare, at EMC Corporation.  “The advanced solution will provide the Social Insurance Institution of Finland with the flexibility to grow and develop the patient record archive as its information management requirements and sheer data dimensions grow.”