As the government will start paying out incentives under the HITECH provision of ARRA next year to doctor's offices that demonstrate the much chewed-over term "meaningful use" with electronic health records, the focus at the HIMSS 2010 tradeshow in Atlanta, Georgia was, unsurprisingly, on EHR products.

But supposedly "meaningfully useful" EHR systems weren't all there was on offer on the show floor of the sprawling Georgia World Congress Center earlier this month. Major vendor Carestream, for instance, used the show to properly debut their latest clinical data archive, launched just last month.

In the video below, Eran Galil, product manager of clinical data storage at Carestream, explained to DOTmed News why the new data archive is now a "very intelligent being."

(Click on the video below to watch Galil's demonstration.)

Get the Flash Player to see this video.

"When you think of an archive, you usually think of big silos of discs just lying down there in a pile in some dark room, but as of today this is no more the case," he said. "An archive is a very intelligent being, a very intelligent piece of software."

Carestream's Clinical Data Archive now helps users pool and store data from different sources, irrespective of vendor. According to Galil, it also improves security by controlling access to the archive from different geographic locations, letting users specify who can see what parts of their data. So, for example, a reading group that works with different hospitals can ensure that rival hospitals don't see each other's data, according to Galil.

And Carestream intends to supply storage space, in addition to the software. "We're offering a turn-key solution for vendors," said Galil. "They can buy storage from us."