OREANDA-NEWS. November 09, 2012. Many attendees at the 5th annual meeting of the eHealth Initiative, EHI Live 2012, are looking for a vendor neutral archive (VNA) solution that helps speed up treatment decisions and reduce costs by unifying patient images and documents across multiple vendor systems, departments, specialties, and locations. They need a standards-based solution that is easily accessible from the EMR and via the web through a zero footprint viewer. In Centricity* Clinical Archive from GE Healthcare, they’ve found it.

Centricity Clinical Archive consists of a suite of products and services designed to provide an end-to-end solution. Unlike vendor neutral archives that only support departmental DICOM consolidation, Centricity Clinical Archive helps healthcare systems streamline enterprise-level and community-wide collaboration with performance through a breadth of interoperability standards, including IHE-XDS, HL7, and DICOM. Rather than forcing customers to custom-build their own solution with the complexity of multiple vendor relationships, GE Healthcare delivers a “360° Go-Live Experience.” It enables all solution planning, implementation, service, and management through a single team of clinical and IT experts.

GE Healthcare IT defines VNA as a Four Level Model for Medical Information Management

“There is a lot of buzz out there about Vendor Neutral Archives,” said Mike Jackman, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare IT. “At GE Healthcare IT, we define it as a 4 level model for medical information management, which helps connect and share information across multiple departments, specialties, locations and vendors, through a breadth of interoperability standards. GE’s VNA solution, Centricity Clinical Archive, is the key to enable this effective collaboration bringing benefits across the organization to the IT departments, the physician and ultimately the patient. ”

The core offering of Centricity Clinical Archive provides a multi-ology, multi-site clinical content repository, that enables consolidation of IT infrastructure for archiving and managing unstructured medical content (images, reports, documents, etc.) using industry standards (DICOM, IHE-XDS). Its enterprise-wide zero footprint clinical viewer and IHE-XDS registry provide anywhere, anytime/near instant access to a patient clinical record. A master patient index links patient records across network boundaries, while the messaging interface engine combines workflow systems like HIS and RIS to update an information repository and keep information consistent across systems. It also equips IT administrators with a choice of virtual server deployment to save data center space, disaster recovery by connecting to cloud storage, and high reliability with standardized configurations.

Since Centricity Clinical Archive is a solution offering, services play an important role in completing the picture. The core services include solution consulting, which assesses the current status and future needs including number and type of departmental systems, IT infrastructure, and processes in order to provide recommendations for long term sustainable data management and sharing strategy. Implementation services help interface existing departmental IT systems from various vendors with the central clinical information archive, ensuring regular consolidation of information (DICOM and non-DICOM). One-time data migration services link existing historical data from the departmental systems to the central information archive, while professional project management services oversee the overall implementation to ensure on-time delivery and exceed quality goals.

SWODIN built on VNA Platform - Benefitting from Increased Clinician Productivity.

In Canada, the Southwestern Ontario Digital Imaging Network (SWODIN) is built on the highly scalable and vendor neutral archive platform of the Centricity Clinical Archive solution plus other web-enabled components. SWODIN is a highly advanced technology and infrastructure network that connects radiologists, referring physicians and specialists at hospitals across southwestern Ontario, allowing them to rapidly access, exchange and store diagnostic images and reports from multiple PACS systems that use many different vendor platforms through a unified, web-based interface.

Today, SWODIN is storing 3.2 million exams every year from 62 hospitals using seven different vendors’ PACS systems. Says Dave Veeneman, PACS/DI-r Manager, London Health Sciences Centre, “The system provides a single point of access to a single patient jacket, where clinicians can see all the exams that a patient has had across Southwestern Ontario. We plan to enhance the system for imaging beyond radiology using industry standards like IHE-XDS". Glen Kearns, IVP of Technology Services, St. Josephs Health and London Health Sciences, added, “The economic benefits most directly tied to a Diagnostic Imaging repository, beyond IT simplification and cost reductions, include increased clinician productivity that translates into two positive impacts for our patients: faster access to imaging services and more time for our clinicians to collaborate on complex cases."

IDC Health Insights Anticipate VNA Spending to Grow in 2013

“Vendor neutral archives provide a strong opportunity for providers who want to centralize and aggregate clinical image repositories, optimize storage infrastructure and add agility and flexibility to their PACS environment. The industry is turning to vendor neutral archives to take advantage of economies of scale in storage, and make clinical images available throughout the enterprise, or to accountable delivery partners in the community, with centralized data management," said Judy Hanover, Research Director for IDC Health Insights. “We anticipate vendor neutral archive spending will continue to grow in 2013, as more providers take advantage of this technology.

*Registered trademark of General Electric Corp.