Rarely does a medical facility rely on one office, solely, to provide all the services that a patient requires 
to receive the best care. Communication between departments is key to offering the best treatment possible. But when the workflow is disrupted by technology, the level of service offered gets bogged down.
Medical facilities with the best imaging equipment on the market today essentially waste their investment in the equipment when they aren’t able to share those images and other data across departments. In some cases where technology offers glitches, the process of sharing radiological images and other data is simply slowed down, but it still offers its own set of issues and hampers quality care.
What healthcare facility administrators and IT personnel are becoming educated about is something called vendor neutral archiving, or VNA. It’s the process by which images and other medical data can be shared, regardless of who is using what hardware. This workflow and storage solution is designed to address all the sharing and storage challenges that facilities are experiencing.
Here are a few concepts of the VNA approach:
- All data is stored in formats that are interchangeable and non-proprietary
- Standard format and standard interfaces are central to the approach so that access is truly vendor neutral
- DICOM content can be stored without issue
- MRI, CT scans and other raw views can be stored and accessed without any discrepancies
Consider how data must be migrated from one department to the next so that all the appropriate medical eyes are on the images and data that lay out the patients’ issue. If that data is stored using a proprietary method, access to other departments will likely be limited.
Physicians can’t treat patients as effectively if the information they need to make a diagnosis can’t be accessed through a unified view. Physicians rely on quick access to lab results, DICOM and non-DICOM images, various other medical reports and doctors’ notes to provide the best treatment in the timeliest fashion. This can only be achieved through proper synchronization of the data from point A to point B, which is what a VNA aims to achieve.
VNA use helps eliminate the issues that healthcare facilities are having by consolidating through virtualization, which wipes out the need for the various tiers of online and offline systems. Utilizing VNA also allows facilities to move to the cloud, something that a majority of administrators are looking into today.
Most VNA providers manage all the services and keep the system running, which means healthcare providers are reducing IT costs and other hardware-related expenses.
OffSite Image Management Inc., provides vendor neutral archiving services that provide seamless storing and archiving across PACS. OffSite has designed their solution so that clients are able to retrieve images and data from any PACS vendor with total transparency and without the burden of high cost. With nearly 50 million images logged, OffSite has the experience that healthcare professionals are looking to partner with.