EAGAN, Minn. (November 14, 2001) - WAM!NET Inc., a global provider of secure, content delivery and hosting services, today announced that the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has selected WAM!NET's secure, fully managed and DICOM-compliant data storage service to store and archive its multiple terabytes of medical image assets. A teaching hospital with more than 620 licensed beds and 5,000 employees, UMMC is located in downtown Baltimore and is part of the University of Maryland Medical System, which includes six hospitals. The hospital provides comprehensive care for the Baltimore community as well as the most complex specialized care for residents of Maryland and the surrounding region. Nationally recognized for maintaining high standards for medical excellence, UMMC has established a heritage of continuously improving its clinical operations and delivered care through the adoption of state-of-the-art imaging technologies and patient-centric clinical systems. The hospital averages 600 digital radiology exams per day, resulting in several gigabytes of data that UMMC must archive and make easily accessible to physicians for long-term patient care. By incorporating WAM!NET's networking and data storage services, UMMC has implemented a secure, on-line/off-site storage service that provides predictable, 24x7 access to images, along with redundancy for protection of data. In doing so, UMMC has allowed its doctors and staff to improve productivity and patient care, while saving significant capital and eliminating ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs. "Delivering high-quality patient care more efficiently and cost-effectively is a perpetual goal of UMMC," said Philip Templeton, M.D., former chairman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Department of Radiology. "Through an extensive evaluation, we found that WAM!NET was able to best meet our data accessibility and data protection requirements, and do so at a fraction of the cost of alternative options. They work in an open standards environment with pure DICOM, protect our capital resources and minimize our space requirements." Previously, UMMC had maintained long-term, on-site storage by managing hundreds of removable discs with images that were manually filed and reinstated on line for retrieval by radiology personnel - a system that, on a comparative basis, is much more time-intensive, inefficient, and costly. Doug Karr, Senior Administrator and Director of Radiology Services, commented on the efficiency brought by the new solution. "Our rigorous day-to-day use of medical imaging technologies, such as CT and MRI scans, results in the generation of hundreds of large files that require tremendous storage capacities and long-term management requirements. At the same time, we must be prepared to deliver these studies in a timely, on-demand basis to our doctors as they render decisions around appropriate patient care. WAM!NET services allow us to achieve this goal."