Intermountain Healthcare, a Salt Lake City-based healthcare system with 22 hospitals, recently announced it signed a multi-year contract with Siemens Healthcare (Malvern, Pa.) for $11.7 million to improve upon the system’s enterprise-wide imaging system. The agreement will allow Intermountain to deploy a vendor neutral archive from Siemens, which will allow images of multiple modalities to be stored in a Dell data center and managed with Dell’s clinical data management software.

 “It is important that we examine cost efficiencies in the way we implement our information technology and Siemens and Dell worked with us to structure this contract in such a way that our costs for managing images would scale with our utilization – but not in a traditional way,” said Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain Healthcare, said in a statement.

“For instance, if our volume expands we would expect our costs per study to go down, as a result of the increased volume, but what gives us more peace of mind is the fact that if our imaging volume actually goes down, we have an opportunity to reduce our overall costs. This type of budget certainty is a key factor in making this solution our long-term answer to enterprise image management.”

Along with Intermountain, another healthcare provider, Pomona Valley (Calif.) Hospital Medical Center (PVHMC), announced it’s using a dual Dell-Siemens product for imaging purposes. The 453-bed, acute care hospital said it has invested in a 3D mammography software product from the two vendors.