Vendor Neutral Archive, or VNA, can be defined as a system designed to store medical images with a standard interface and format so it can be accessed by many vendors and different systems in a neutral manner. Vendor neutrality might seem obvious to most people, but each vendor wants to protect their asset so they can capitalize on it, and thus, the lack of neutrality among service providers.
Vendors place many obstacles in order to keep the customers locked into legacy systems. The customer usually thinks the process is too difficult and migrating the data to new technology might not be worth the effort. However, VNA has simplified the process, and it has been gaining ground as a source to provide the architecture and technology for a centralized data archiving resource for different systems and vendors.
A report written by Joe Marion of HealthCare Integration Strategies explains in detail the benefit of VNA for managing data, making it accessible and its real-world applications. The report can be downloaded at the BridgeHead Software site.
BridgeHead Software is a provider of Healthcare Data Management (HDM) and other healthcare related solutions for the digital age. Over 1200 hospitals around the world rely on the solutions the company provides for storing, protecting and sharing clinical and administration information. The BridgeHead VNA approach gives hospitals access to the data they need; whether it is Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) or none-DICOM archiving, it makes complete data availability at all times.
Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) application is the old system healthcare organizations used, and in some cases, are still using to store data. This system is expensive, time-consuming and ineffective in an industry which is increasingly moving towards digitizing all their content.
The move towards VNA has been a consolidated effort by healthcare organizations to make this platform the preferred choice for storing, protecting and sharing health related data. As cloud infrastructure becomes more reliable, it will make this platform even better because the data created by hospitals and imaging centers will be more accessible across different systems and platforms globally.
"It's no secret that healthcare data is growing at a phenomenal rate. The challenge, with regards to medical image data, is that it doesn't all adhere to standard formats such as DICOM. BridgeHead supports the drive for improved clinical care by storing and protecting all of a hospital's data (not just DICOM) and enabling data to be shared back to individuals or systems that need it the most. In doing so, we believe we can help reduce the cost of data management," explained Jim Beagle, CEO of BridgeHead Software.
Edited by
Allison Boccamazzo
