Most healthcare providers are influenced to move toward vendor neutral archiving (VNA) strategies due to the more efficient process that such a method can provide. However, administrators are also attracted to cost savings.
For instance, a hospital located in Philadelphia achieved a cost savings of nearly $3 million in
the five years since it adopted a vendor neutral archiving platform. The savings, according to a radiology administrator at the hospital, came from separating from the expensive method through which traditional archiving is carried out.
When hospitals go with vendor neutral archiving, they see a number of serious benefits. When traditional picture archiving systems (PACS) are chosen, the migration of information can often cost millions of dollars, mostly due to conversion processes and management of the project among other items. When a hospital goes with a VNA, they circumvent these issues and the costs as well.
Another perk that hospitals see with their VNA system is the ability to work with any hardware vendor, storage tier or application. Furthermore, patients receive better quality of care as physicians are able to access information with more ease and with much better up time.
With a VNA, physicians in any department are suddenly able to share imaging and information with any other provider in the hospital and outside the hospital, which means outside specialists can quickly be updated on a patient case.
Organizations that have gone through the process of adopting a VNA say don’t pay any attention to any of the hype in the sales pitches from VNA providers. Instead, talk directly to the professionals in the information systems department to assist you in creating an enterprise imaging committee.
The rate at which hospitals are adopting VNAs is quite impressive. In 2011, of the 1.4 billion radiology images that were filtered through PACS, only 75 million were stored via VNA, which represented only 5.4 percent of images being captured. However, that number is expected to jump to 31 percent within the next two years.
Other studies have revealed that nearly a third of hospitals in the U.S. have adopted a VNA and another 20 percent said they have plans to adopt a VNA within the next two years.
Most hospitals face a challenge when it comes to adopting an imaging data center in the multisite environment. A true VNA will differ from a PACS archive that aggregates images from a vendor’s multiple PACS. It doesn’t really matter how efficient you think your PACS is at the moment because there are definitely things it cannot do that a true VNA can tackle. There is a good chance that your PACS isn’t capable of sharing your medical images with other departments, which means you’re probably still relying on old technology like burning CDs to share your imaging.
Don’t let the cost of startup be a deterrent. When you partner with OffSite Image Management, Inc., you are getting a quality partner that only requires you to pay for what you use.