If your healthcare facility isn’t already invested in vendor neutral archiving (VNA), there is a good chance that you will at least be considering it within the next four years. It’s a trend that doesn’t look to be slowing anytime soon.
According to a study by InMedica, a company that provides market research and consulting for the medical electronics industry, around 31 percent of all medical images will be stored in
a VNA system by 2017. If you have encountered a VNA system, you know why this trend is occurring, and it all has to do with the benefits that come with the technology involved.
The VNA system is giving healthcare facilities more control than what they could achieve with a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) alone. How, you ask? Perhaps most importantly, healthcare professionals are getting automatic access to their patients’ clinical history, which includes medical imaging. VNAs are offering this ease of access across departments and across facilities, which means doctors consulting on a case can communicate/share imaging and data regardless of how many miles separate them.
Upgrading a PACS can be a time-consuming and cumbersome experience, but when VNAs are involved, the process generally only takes hours. Lifecycle management is also much less rigorous and becomes quite simplified with a VNA.
So, what should your VNA be doing for you? Most facilities that have adopted a true VNA can count on more patient-centric storage and full support of open standards. When you adopt a VNA, you should be able to manage a variety of content, from audio to video to images and other data objects. You will also find it much easier to search for items in storage for retrieval.
Patient privacy is something that is highly regarded across the entire enterprise, and privacy issues don’t take a back seat with VNAs. Patient privacy and security is double checked in audit trails. As the name would suggest, a true VNA is hardware agnostic, meaning it will work with any hospitals hardware vendor.
Your facility probably invested a lot of money on your PACS, but it has likely not been able to provide you with all the services you ask of it. The difference between a VNA and your PACS archiving is that a VNA will no longer tether information to physical addressed storage. Also, a VNA will use storage techniques that make it easier to access data, including medical imaging, than what you could achieve with a PACS.
VNAs offer a significant cost savings as well. Currently, the cost to transfer a CT scan using CD-based technology costs nearly $800. VNAs are trending because they can significantly reduce this cost.
OffSite Image Management Inc., has embraced true VNA technology to offer its clients a quality solution at a price that fits the rural healthcare facility budget. OffSite’s VNA solution involves using multiple Level IV data centers so your information will be secure and always available to you. The OffSite solution also enables you to manage all of your data and take advantage of scalable storage with no limits. If you are considering a VNA, look at OffSite’s unique services, which are on par with or better than solutions being offered at much greater costs.