Offsite Archiving Can Handle Your Imaging Needs
Technology changes quite rapidly, but given the cost of medical IT technology today, hospitals are slow to switch out expensive equipment. They will, however, deploy interoperability solutions, and that can unearth some problems as a hospital’s IT infrastructure can have layer upon layer of solutions intermingling. What is coming out as a go-to solution is offsite archiving.
The layers of infrastructure will unfortunately impact any current interoperability project. Most layers have built upon what is underneath it. The quality of each layer might differ depending on what was available in the budget for that given year. Some layers might lack innovation and prove to be a weak link in the infrastructure. However, in years that aren’t so lean, there could be a push to evolve rapidly, which can be a challenge as well.
There can be thousands of disparate software solutions over a few decades that have stacked up on top of each other. However, the IT tools that are standard today weren’t around a decade ago, and in some cases, were just brought to the table in the last five years. Regardless of what these new solutions bring, there is still the history of technology from the past that affects the strength of a hospital’s system today.
This problem really comes to light when a large-scale EMR or data center migration project gets underway. What happens is that the teams that are in charge of the migration find while taking inventory that there is no documentation in the servers, which means they can’t identify the purpose of the data. In the worst-case scenario, they have to shut down the servers and disrupt all operations, which can cause its share of headaches across the entire hospital system.
Rather than build another layer on top of what exists on current servers, hospitals and clinics can utilize offsite archiving. Instead of investing more money in labor and/or capital expenses, they’re getting exactly what they need through offsite archiving.
Vendor neutral archiving (VNA) technology is what’s being brought in to assist a better, more secure transfer of information from one department to another or from one hospital to another – regardless of which PACS vendor they’re using. It’s important to remember that not all vendors are approaching VNA and offsite archiving the same way. Make sure you’re working with a vendor that is willing to help when it comes to adopting solutions that fit a multisite environment.
At OffSite Image Management, Inc., we’ve developed an offsite archiving system that utilizes the power of VNA to expertly handle all of your imaging needs. We know that regardless of how efficient your PACS is, there are a number of things it wasn’t created to do, such as share your images with other departments. It also can’t migrate your studies to other facilities. With OffSite’s archiving process, we’re able to take care of everything your PACS can’t. Contact us today and let’s talk about how we are going to help you gain better access to your images.