Not only does having medical images readily available assist healthcare providers in being able to take better care of their patients; it’s also important to stay compliant with meaningful use regulations. Vendor neutral archives (VNA) assist health IT infrastructure specialists to ensure that image access is not an issue.
It’s often the case that PACS (picture archiving communications systems) present a challenge in gaining easy access to images and other non-DICOM data. For example, medical images are fenced off in one department and made inaccessible to people in other departments. The way many PACS are configured, the clinician has to log in to separate systems to get access to the images and other data they need. VNA has helped to decouple PACS and workstations.
Better Viewing Experiences
A VNA solution offers one viewing experience that does not require an advanced level of proficiency. The experience will differ depending on the VNA vendor, which is why it’s important to choose one that offers true VNA.
So, how do VNA packages differ? The term true VNA came up after different iterations of the service began to show limitations. For example, a healthcare facility could select a vendor and think they’re going to get ADT updates to image files stored in the archive but find out they don’t receive them. Or they expect to have context management tools available and find out that they are also missing. Maybe they read about VNA offering the ability to store an entire suite of DICOM SOP classes and wrongly assumed that would come as part of the VNA package.
It’s for these reasons that you should not only expect to get what is listed above in your true VNA package, but you should also get the ability to have all objects available in a non-proprietary format.
Implementation Advice
To ensure you’re getting the most out of your VNA, keep in mind that unstructured healthcare data is on an upward growth pattern, which means your VNA needs to be able to adapt if you’re going to efficiently sort through all your data, whether it is DICOM or not. Partner with a vendor that gives you this type of flexibility.
Archive expansion is also important, which means you’re going to have to create policies that account for this and prioritize how implementations will be carried out. This could even involve creating archiving best practices, which will be built around your unique workflow needs.
At OffSite Image Management, our approach to VNA has been industry leading. From day one we’ve established true VNA technology with all the tools you need to gain freedom from a highly proprietary environment. Contact us and find out more about how we can make viewing images easy.
