Healthcare providers across the nation are looking at ways they can establish a better and more secure healthcare enterprise. The ones that
are succeeding are doing it with vendor neutral archiving (VNA).
To get started, you have to have a strategy. Your first thought should be on how you can get ready to migrate your data to a VNA. Consider consolidating your enterprise archive and communication layers from every department. It’s important to have one silo of information so there are no hiccups in the migration process, which is already a huge undertaking on its own. You’ll find more stabilization in consolidation.
A vital part of your VNA strategy is to avoid proprietary system. The reason you want to migrate into a VNA is that you’ll finally have full control and ownership of your data, and you won’t have any more roadblocks when it comes to sharing this data with disparate systems.
Not all VNA is actually “true” VNA. If you’re part of a healthcare enterprise and you want to get the most out of your investment, make sure your vendor is providing VNA that is able to aggregate query results from as many PACS or locations that you need to be in contact with. This is especially important of rural providers whose patients might need to see specialists at bigger facilities.
Your VNA should also support having other diagnostics and integration of other tools as needed. Part of the beauty of VNA is that it plays nice with others, which means you shouldn’t be prohibited from utilizing tools that work for your providers.
VNA also allows for some cost savings, especially in long-term storage costs. True VNA should allow you to compress many tiers of storage, which could be a revenue generator for you if you want to take on the responsibility of archiving information from other institutions.
When choosing a vendor, look for one with experience. Pick the one that can offer you examples of how their VNA works in real-life situations with current clients. Can they produce on-the-fly conversions and mapping of data elements in the DICOM? Can their solutions fully support data exchange between PACS? These are questions you must be able to answer before you choose your vendor.
Most hospitals face huge challenges when it comes to adopting an imaging data center in a multisite environment. Bigger issues ensue when they decide to swap out an old PACS for a new one, which is another reason it’s important to provide a central archive. The same problems can occur when a partnership is struck and other hospitals and/networks are suddenly living under your roof.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., has relied on true VNA to deliver its services for years. Our VNA technology offers seamless image storage and archiving capability; regardless of what PACS you’re running. If you’ve had trouble storing and retrieving data from your PACS vendor, get total transparency and smooth, effective services from us and skip all the headaches.