The Advantages of VNA in Improving the Effectiveness of Diagnostic Images
The technological challenges healthcare industry workers face on a daily basis are numerous. Whether it’s a small critical care facility in a rural region or a large hospital group in a major metropolitan area, picture archiving communication systems (PACS) often require an extra component to make them more usable, efficient and effective in handling diagnostic images.
Physicians need unfettered access to the critical information provided by diagnostic images. Unfortunately, communication from department to department is compromised by disparate systems that use proprietary software. Now that patients are seeing multiple providers for their healthcare needs, diagnostic images need to be accessible across multiple facilities, and it’s a problem that the industry is working to improve upon.
The inability to share images is an issue that greatly affects the overall quality of the facility, and it’s often a technological issue few, other than those in the medical IT field, know much about. Getting every department on the same page where electronic medical records, diagnostic images, and other technical aspects of the healthcare industry are concerned, is important if a viable solution is going to be reached. When everything is flowing smoothly, images are being archived, accessed and shared without roadblocks, and patient satisfaction ratings improve drastically.
Patients are just as unaware of what’s going on behind the scenes, unless they are made to go through another examination due to the poor performance of a provider’s archiving communication system – images are lost, destroyed, or unreadable on CDs. To gain more clarity on the diagnostic images issue, IT professionals are looking into vendor neutral archiving technology (VNA), the best of which is based in the cloud. Let’s take a look at what advantages VNA brings to the table:
- Diagnostic images are easier to view. No longer do clinicians have to view images that are beholden to specific language written for a piece of software. VNA is vendor agnostic, meaning that it will read DICOM images regardless of the system from which they came.
- One point of integration makes imaging more streamlined. In some hospital settings, there are 25 or more disparate systems that are trying to manage all the diagnostic images. A robust VNA solution can serve as the integration point for all these systems, which effectively negates the roadblocks that were established as the rush to establish an electronic health records system occurred.
- Future migration costs are eliminated. Replicating diagnostic images is not only time consuming, it’s also expensive. A true VNA solution will eliminate the costs associated with system replacement, which is where most replication takes place.
OffSite Image Management Inc. is a company that has led the industry in VNA solutions. Our cloud-based offering eliminates the trouble clinicians have archiving, accessing and sharing diagnostic images. We’re focused on creating solutions that are easy to use, cost effective, yet of the highest quality. Find out more about how we can save you time, money and improve the way you treat patients by contacting us today.