The healthcare industry has witnessed a proliferation of images, formats and procedures for storing and accessing digital images over the last decade. The picture archiving communication systems (PACS) market has exploded, which is helping to push the proliferation even further. This is something you’ve probably already noticed in your healthcare facility.
In order to control costs and produce better quality care for patients, the healthcare industry, and perhaps even administrators at your facility, has looked to centralized image storage for solutions. The centralized method provides better data mining capabilities and medical image access across departments.
What the healthcare community is learning, slowly, is that using a vendor neutral archive (VNA) is the way to go when collating, managing and storing the various images and data across disparate PACS. One study concluded that in 2011 there was 1.4 billion radiology images produced and only 5.4 percent of them were stored on a vendor neutral archive. While that percentage is startlingly low, industry experts believe the VNA adoption will jump to 30 percent by 2016.
If you’re not yet familiar with VNAs, you should know that the healthcare community defines it as an archiving platform for medical images that provide an open architecture for database management. This includes disaster recovery provisions, long-term storage and the upmost security measures available. VNAs are also expected to work with digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) systems.
If you’ve already considered going with a VNA at your facility, you’re probably doing so because of the minimized costs you’ll find in storing your images there. Many medical facilities need to share images across departments, which can be a hassle if the current PACS isn’t set up with open architecture like you’ll find with a VNA. Centralized image storage through a VNA is something more and more healthcare providers are gravitating toward so they can share data easily across departments.
Very few patients rely on the care of one provider. While it might have been commonplace to seek the medical assistance of one primary care physician in the past, patients today are seeking out the help of multiple doctors and specialists who need access to the medical imaging to provide more thorough care. Centralized image storage through VNAs is giving these specialists and doctors the access they require to make more accurate and faster diagnoses.
The centralized image storage is also giving data miners the access they need to offer more value to their facilities. If you think about the sheer size of 114 petabytes, which is what industry experts believe we’ll reach in VNA storage within the next two years, it’s the equivalent of data mining gold.
Vendors offering true VNA solutions are assisting the healthcare community in separating themselves from old, inefficient processes, such as CD burning as a means of storing and sharing medical images.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., is a medical image storage company that is giving critical care facilities the solutions they need to move into the 21 century. The VNA solutions here at OffSite include top-notch security, access, storage and sharing capabilities that healthcare providers have to come to expect with their sensitive data.