Enterprise Archiving Starts With a Strategy: What’s Yours?.

Some healthcare providers aren’t putting a focus on their IT investment and it shows in the way their medical records, including images and HL7 data, are archived and shared. Radiologists and physicians working in these systems or with them know the difficulties involved in providing the best care they can for their patients. Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-common occurrence.

Some organizations have looked at transitioning to an enterprise imaging system, but are stopped in their tracks once they see the costs involved. Larger hospital systems might be looking at upwards of $2 million per hospital as they transition from CD burning technology to fully digital enterprise archiving. However, you have to consider that at a cost of $8 to $15 per CD currently being spent, going digital, even if it does involve a steep up-front cost, looks better in the end, especially when you consider that hospitals will spend up to $100,000 a year to have CDs delivered to providers through trusted couriers.

Here’s another question to ask yourself as you consider adopting an enterprise archive: how much are you paying your current staff to manage each PACS you have for each department? Most providers are using different PACS in each department, which means they require a dedicated IT employee to manage them. When you go to an enterprise archive, all images are stored in one silo and can be managed remotely by the company in charge of the database.

If you’ve been considering a vendor neutral archive (VNA) to assist you in your archiving needs, you’re on the right track. A VNA can help you move past the traditional PACS archiving process and build a consolidated system that is centralized, and perhaps most importantly – standardized. The VNA works as an archive, but it is also a system that will assist you in keeping track of every type of diagnostic image you have for each of your patients. Even non-DICOM images will have a home in a VNA. Furthermore, some vendors are also bringing in a capability to store your HL7 data as well, which means you can have all your important data in one silo.

Enterprise archiving with a VNA gives you the power to manage the lifecycle of an image. This makes sense on a cost basis, but it also makes sense when you consider the reduction of administrative duties it requires and most importantly, the speed at which you are able to care for your patients.

If compliance issues have been on your mind, VNA can also address those. For instance, IPAA security policies enacted in 2005 require healthcare providers to have a disaster recovery plan for their patient data. This has been a stumbling block for many providers that try to foot the bill on in-house solutions, which are expensive to acquire and manage.

Going off site with OffSite Image Management, Inc., makes sense for many reasons. We embrace VNA and work with Level IV datacenters where disaster recovery policies are second to none and security is also unmatched. Contact us today for more information.