Acuo’s DICOM Services Grid software suite offers superior image management, archiving, and migration solutions that are extensible and collaborative. Acuo delivers a set of applications that extend and virtualizes storage, network, and application resources. Acuo’s architecture scales up and out to create either very large centralized repositories or fully distributed DICOM Storage Grids that offer superior integration, lower total cost of ownership, bandwidth control, speed of deployment, and ease of management.

Acuo’s solutions were built with the primary purpose of archiving medical images for a healthcare enterprise in a highly interoperable fashion. Instead of modifying existing solutions, Acuo has designed an easily scalable, peer aware; standards based middleware that is capable of being deployed as an small instance acting as an intelligent content based router as well as supporting an entire country’s medical imaging archive.

The Acuo Technologies software supports standards such as DICOM, HL7, and IHE profiles, including XDS through an XDS-I Imaging Document Source. The database schema allows for fast, portable databases which reduce maintenance, enables rational segregation as well as efficient aggregation. The database strategy avoids the performance failures experienced by most large systems. The ability to manage the entire distributed system via the management console sets Acuo apart as a user configurable and managed software solution, not a restricted vendor controlled implementation.

Possibly one of the most important aspects of the Acuo solution is the migration and Clinical ILM capabilities. This capability ensures that the customer never needs to pay for regaining ownership of their images again. The Clinical ILM aspect allows Acuo to drive clinical meta data into the storage layer allowing the appropriate area for ILM policies to be enacted. Without this capability, the data is forever tied to the application that stored it, or the only ILM policies that can be enacted are limited to basic elements such as source, or time received.

From Acuo’s inception we wanted to provide a software solution that would provide the following guiding principals to a healthcare enterprise:

* Conform to internationally recognized standards for digital medical imaging and provide an open solution.
* Allow for the storage of medical images from all disciplines independent of the choice of PACS vendors.
* Facilitate on demand capacity growth as required with no impact to care givers, no downtime, and no need for costly data migration.
* Provide a single unified multi-site archive that can expand in geographic footprint, as needed when needed.
* Enable real time automated disaster recovery without the need for manual restoration processes that result in service disruptions.
* Preserve investment in server and storage hardware and facilitate the replacement of current or obsolete components without service disruptions, loss of data, or manual data migration.
* Provide native data migration tools and components enabling ease of migration from any existing PACS vendor to the new DICOM Archive Manager.
* Offer an open database schema which is not built upon commercial off the shelf database technology
* Be built upon Grid computing models enabling effective and efficient multi-site connectivity along with virtualized components in the data center for ultimate scalability
* Architected with commercial off the shelf components not requiring any proprietary hardware or software components enabling lowest possible TCO.
* Conform to regulatory guidelines for availability and privacy and ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of stored medical images for decades.

These guiding principals when implemented will result in pertinent data in the hands of medical personnel quicker, patients are not waiting for treatments and medications, and the chance of human error is greatly reduced. In the end this helps the overall clinical process run smoothly and the patient has a greater experience.

The vision became reality with Acuo’s DICOM Services Grid, introduced commercially in 2001 after receiving its FDA 510-K approval.

As a company, Acuo Technologies maintains the old-fashioned Midwestern values of its founders. We are proud of the performance of our products. We take pride in the level of service and support we provide --- both to end users and its PACS partners.