Resurgens Orthopaedics has entered into a collaboration agreement to deploy Merge Healthcare Honeycomb cloud-based solution, designed to provide a long-term storage option that houses images securely in multiple locations.

The solution, which eliminates the management and maintenance of onsite hardware, delivers comprehensive functionality in a high-security framework that meets HIPAA and other privacy requirements.

Resurgens Orthopaedics CIO Bradley Dick said like many practice, the Georgia-based orthopaedic practice is seeing more patients each year which means its image storage needs are continually growing.

"Leveraging Merge Honeycomb Archive instead of adding more onsite storage made perfect sense as it complements our Merge OrthoPACS solution, we can increase capacity when we need, and we can access and share our images in the Merge Honeycomb cloud which eliminates any risk of downtime," Dick added.

Merge Healthcare CEO Jeff Surges said since the launch of the new cloud-based application, the company has dded 3.3 million studies under contract to its cloud-based archive.

"We expect that demand to continue since imaging accounts for up to 90% of all data stored in electronic health records," Surges added.

"Add in privacy rules that require storage of electronic health data, including digital images, and you see how the need to securely store and share medical images has grown — specifically in the cloud."