Offsite VNA Solutions to the Rescue
The average patient seeks out medical assistance from multiple practitioners today, which is why it’s
so important for medical data, especially medical imaging, to be shared without barriers. More and more facilities are adopting vendor neutral archive (VNA) solutions to meet this need and to get around the proprietary issues they often face with a PACS alone.
Hospital IT departments working with medical imaging data are also looking to VNA to assist them in enterprise-wide archiving. This can help them to reduce the need for migrating data which can be extremely time consuming and costly.
An example of a hospital system that took on VNA with great success is a combined effort by the State University of New York and Upstate Medical University in Syracuse (SUNY). The reason for bringing in VNA technology was to improve life cycle management of their DICOM and their non-DICOM images. They found that going with a single repository simplified the process, more so than utilizing multiple departmental PACS.
SUNY was like many hospitals, which used their PACS as an archive through which they would view images directly. However, after enabling image access for both entities through an electronic medical records system, they found that they had an easier time accessing images. Anyone with access to a patient’s chart could gain access to the images directly through the VNA.
With the two systems linked, the 1,500 users across the enterprise could more efficiently access and share, making workflow less interrupted. Clinical speeds are also important, which is why images are available in DICOM format as well as a faster version of the same image, only in JPEG format.
There is obviously more than one way to utilize the effectiveness of VNA technology, another of which is for radiology groups to read for multiple sites. Since different sites have PACS unique to their own facility, the VNA steps in to assist in alleviating proprietary issues, which allows the radiology group access to all types of image formats, DICOM and non-DICOM.
Radiology departments and groups today are looking for faster, cheaper and more reliable technologies to assist them in doing their jobs, improving patient care, and coming in under budget. VNA is allowing them to do that, but only if the technology is true VNA. Since vendors operate under different definitions of VNA, it’s important to note that true VNA does the following:
- Provides context management
- Handles ADT updates to images stored in the archive
- Stores complete suite of DICOM SOP classes
- Allows for the manipulation of DICOM tags
- Stores objects in non-proprietary format
- Prepares a PACS through HL7 for ingestion of images from other PACS
If your vendor isn’t offering these perks, you’re not getting true VNA. OffSite Image Management, Inc. is a provider of true VNA. Our solutions not only improve your current workflow, we can save you money. Contact us today and let’s discuss your current system and your needs for today and the future.