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WORM & Immutable Archival

Write-once optical archival for regulated medical records in 1997 — the first of many systems whose retention rule was a law rather than a policy.

Also known as WORM, Immutable Storage, Optical Archive

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 3 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Deployed WORM optical archival addressing the immutability, retention and integrity requirements that govern regulated medical records. These were architecture decisions rather than storage settings.

This is the earliest instance of a pattern that runs through the whole career: systems where the retention rule is a law rather than a policy. WORM archives for medical records in 1997; hospital networks under HIPAA and Department of Defense work through 2004; then two decades where CJIS criminal justice records, HIPAA patient information, court records and elections data shared one platform under Florida public records law.

Applied in

  • StorComm PACS Platform1997–1999Chief system designer of a clinical picture archiving and communication platform for hospital customers.
  • StorComm Teleradiology Platform1997–1999Diagnostic imaging delivered to radiologists at home over ISDN and dial-up — telemedicine fifteen years before the market used the word.

Career

Attested by

See also

Also searched as

  • records management
  • information governance
  • eDiscovery
  • legal hold
  • defensible disposition
  • retention schedule
  • immutable storage
  • WORM
  • PACS
  • DICOM
  • medical imaging
  • teleradiology
  • clinical archive