When you think of Symantec, you think of computer antivirus and internet security software. The company is also known for storage management and critical infrastructure solutions in many industries. Now Symantec has entered the health IT sector in full force with its new Symantec Health Safe and Symantec Health Image Share solutions, debuting at HIMSS this week.

Symantec Health Safe and is an on-demand cloud storage solution for medical images.

"Medical images are very large files. Modalities are getting very dense. We've gone from 8- to 64- to 128-slice modalities in very high resolution work, advanced visualization, 3D and 4D and that gets very difficult to handle to maneuver," said David Finn, Symantec Health IT officer.
Health Safe provides affordable and reliable storage to accommodate the growing number and size of medical images, capacity on demand and business analytics to provide budget predictability and control. It also assures business continuity so that medical images are secure and available in the event of a business disruption, a disaster or a security breach.

Note that Symantec is not a PACS or clinical workflow provider.

"We are not a clinical company. But once you've got those images, we want the provider to allow us to take care of them so they don't have to worry about the storage, cooling and powering in a data center.... It's an infrastructure in the cloud."

Their newest offering, Symantec Health Image Share, is a medical image software service.

"Our offering allows non-affiliated physicians--doctors who may never have heard of your facility--to send you an image that they're sending a patient, or to get images from you if they're being used as a referring physician," Finn said.

Symantec Health Image Share provides the ability for non-affiliated clinicians to search, view and download images with a physician-friendly web interface; plus secure provider-to-provider image sharing to streamline clinical operations, reduce re-imaging, and enable hospital outreach for expanding the referral network.

The company might find a significant clientele for its solutions as the requirements for fund eligibility are clarified for the HITECH health funding portion of the ARRA stimulus package. It's not just health care providers, such as hospitals and physicians, that will have to meet the eligibility standards.

"It also applies to those companies that are developing software to run in those environments. They are going to have to meet certain standards around security and audit logging," Finn said. "Then you have business associates to hospitals and doctors' offices and under HITECH they will be required to meet the same standards as a physician or hospital. So everyone is going to have to ratchet up what they are doing and how they are doing it.... A lot of people are waiting for budgets and waiting for the final rules around health information exchange to build some strategies around that."

In the meantime, Symantec is jumping into the health IT space with its feet on the ground and its head in the cloud.

"While the PACS vendors have done a pretty good job, we don't want to get into the clinical business. There are software companies that specialize in taking care of patients and they do it very well. That isn't what we do. We take care of data," Finn said.

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