PVNA Offers Efficiencies That More Providers are Looking For
It doesn’t matter what the industry is, finding ways to become more efficient and more effective while saving money is one of the top objectives. In the healthcare industry, keeping costs down comes second to the top priority, which is to offer the best patient care available. However, what’s helping providers do both with equal focus is vendor neutral archiving, or VNA. Recently, a new term has been coined to reflect the importance of bringing the picture archiving communication systems in line with VNA, thus the acronym PVNA.
According to a report from the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine, PVNA was responsible for nearly $3 million in savings over a five-year period at a Philadelphia-based children’s hospital. The PVNA helped them avoid an estimated $2.8 million expenditure on a new PACS storage strategy. The bulk of the costs were found in the migration of data, project management and conversions. Furthermore, as is indicated with the name, vendor neutral systems can work with any application, hardware vendor, or storage solution, which also provides cost savings and more efficiency that leads to better patient care.
There are some things to consider before purchasing a PVNA solution:
- Be prepared to see past any hype being thrown at you by potential vendors who specialize, or say they specialize, in VNA technology.
- Create a committee that will govern the image management process, which includes creating and using data.
- Only sign up for a solution that is truly vendor neutral. Not everyone has the same definition of what VNA or PVNA is, so shop carefully and ask questions.
InMedica reported a couple of years ago that only 75 million medical images captured by PACS were stored via PVNA, and that’s out of a total of 1.4 billion total images. There is a much larger percentage of providers using VNA today, but there are a number of providers still riding the fence.
The inclusion of a PVNA to a hospital system, or even a critical care hospital, will instantly offer a seamless image storing and archiving capability. It’s a benefit that is not available with proprietary solutions.
PVNA is now being offered in the cloud, which adds even more functionality, affordability and access than ever before. Cloud-based solutions offer more uptime because all data is stored off site and isn’t compromised by issues directly impacting the area of the provider’s facility. The focus switches from a centralized storage method to one where a more appropriate title would perhaps be “information exchange.”
The PVNA can manage and exchange medical images. Hospitals that have an incentive to collaborate are finding cloud-based exchanges to be a huge benefit. OffSite Image Management, Inc. has harnessed the power of cloud-based VNA and PVNA so providers no longer experience the usual roadblocks to archiving and sharing medical images and data across departments or across facilities. Contact us today and let’s get started with a solution that fits your needs.