VA's VistA reaches 1B+ images

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has reported that VistA Imaging, the medical and healthcare imaging system used in VA medical centers, attained more than one billion stored images in January.

The imaging system captures clinical images, scanned documents, motion video and other non-text data, as well as makes them part of a patient's EHR. In the course of serving 1.2 million patients a month, the department said it stores 20-25 million images in the VistA Imaging system. In 2009, a total of 290 million images is expected to be stored. Storage space in use today is approximately one petabyte, or one million gigabytes.

VistA first became operational in 1990 at the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to handle radiology data and images. In 1999, the VA spread its use to all its medical centers. More than 7.8 million Veterans are enrolled in the VA healthcare system.

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