PVNA: The Direction of the Future
Vendor neutral archiving (VNA) has been around for a while now, long enough for most radiologists and IT personnel to know that VNA is a vital component in unifying diagnostic imaging workflows. Joining the picture archiving communications system (PACS) with VNA creates a solid foundation called PVNA, which is helping to advance the imaging field.
1. PVNA Offers Cost Efficiency
Large hospital groups with larger resources can more easily approach the topic of outfitting their facilities with on-premise PVNAs, but the conversation is vastly different for the smaller providers. When budgets are limited and existing infrastructure can’t easily be replaced, it falls to cloud-based solutions to come to the rescue.
2. Business Continuity
One of the perks of taking on an offsite vendor for image management is that there are built in business continuity solutions that can’t be established with an on-site archiving system. For instance, PVNA advocates that go to the cloud will have their data stored on multiple servers at geographically unique data centers. This ensures that all the data will be available at all times. Should a natural or manmade disaster compromise the availability of data in one location, it will be available at others.
While the disaster recovery protocols are important, so too is time. A popular reason for going with an offsite vendor for image archiving and communication services is that they bear the weight of maintenance and upgrading issues. Clients of these offsite providers enjoy the access they have to their data and their IT staff have valuable time for other projects as they do not have responsibilities related to image archiving.
Many in the healthcare industry are trying to push themselves out of the archiving business for the reasons stated above. In-house IT departments don’t need the added hassles related to archiving and sharing medial images, especially as diagnostic applications become more complex and more integrated into the healthcare-related workflow.
3. Phase Out Old Technology
Some providers are still using CD burning technology, which they use as their archiving mechanism as well as their sharing method. This presents some risk and a modicum of inefficiency as discs are easily misplaced and/or incorrectly burned. There is also the storage issue to consider. Even though the discs are relatively small, the amount of images being captured today quickly leads to a problem related to the physical space in which these discs are being stored.
The future of PACS and VNA is to take them offsite to a vendor with PVNA services that can rarely be matched by an on-premise solution. The future is about intelligent data repositories that take the roadblocks out of the diagnostic workflow process. The cloud is the perfect atmosphere for the future of medical image archiving and access.
OffSite Image management, Inc., is leading the industry in PVNA technology. Our services are especially beneficial to providers who have for too long dealt with one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead of being priced out and underserved, OffSite offers clients solutions that can fit any budget, guaranteeing savings and performance.