How DICOM Exchange and VNA Work Together.

How are you sharing your medical images today? For a good number of facilities, patients are sent away with a CD with their images burned onto them, which they’ll take to their other doctors for their consideration. Or, the CDs are mailed off to doctors that need to see them. A more efficient method of sharing images is through a DICOM exchange that takes the risk and inefficiencies out of sharing images.

More and more facilities are realizing the power of vendor neutral archiving (VNA) and are adopting it so they no longer have to rely on CD burners to share their images. DICOM exchange and VNA come together to help healthcare providers stop using their picture archiving and communication system (PACS) as an archive. Instead, with images stored in DICOM format, VNA can help you create JPEGs that offer a quick view of the stored image.

In the case of SUNY Upstate Medical University, medical professionals with access to patient charts could also access medical images through the VNA, which takes the burden off of the PACS workstation. The goal was to reengineer the workflow with as little disruption as possible, which is why SUNY administrators installed its VNA system. Furthermore, with images stored in DICOM format, which means pulling them up for viewing will not meet clinical speeds, which is why the JPEGS are created through the VNA.
It wasn’t long ago that people had different definitions of VNA, which inspired a qualifier. “True” VNA should allow the user to aggregate query results from varying PACS locations. It should also allow for dynamic DICOM tag morphing, publish to an XDS repository of XDS-1 manifests, support DICOM and non-DICOM content, support API level integrated connectivity to many storage platforms from varying vendors and allow you independence from hardware. There are actually many more requirements to meet to be considered a true VNA, but this list gives you an idea of some of the major requirements.

What’s exciting about DICOM exchange and VNA coming together is that it’s a perfect solution for health image exchanges, which are giving healthcare providers a less costly and more efficient way to view medical images. A federated radiology image exchange removes barriers that have blocked the smooth exchange of medical images. These exchanges are providing a long-term sustainable health information platform for all involved.

OffSite Image Management, Inc., has established health image exchanges in a handful of states using DICOM exchange and VNA to bring incredible efficiencies to healthcare providers, including those in rural areas that are historically understaffed and lack the budget to bring in big-ticket technology to handle their image routing. However, with the DICOM exchange and VNA solutions provided by OffSite, all of our clients have access to the medical images they need and storage in a secure database where disaster recovery processes keep you images available to you 99.9 percent of the time.