From the October 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
By Cristine Kao
One of the primary objectives of vendor-neutral archiving has traditionally focused on transitioning from disparate departmental storage solutions to a single consolidated data storage platform. Consolidation does simplify data access while simultaneously reducing both hardware and management expenses. However, migrating data from numerous systems to a single archiving platform is not a task most health care providers can afford to do in the short-term. Therefore, an excellent option is to establish a VNA that can federate relevant patient data stored on disparate platforms and enable that data to be efficiently accessed by clinicians.
Reading descriptive metadata that contains DICOM image header information is a first step. This capability allows a VNA to associate, for example, prior radiology or cardiology patient images with a current imaging study — and then retrieve these imaging studies and related reports from various systems to make this data presentable at their native workstation to radiologists and clinicians.
A fully featured VNA must also contain mechanisms to perform data synchronization for non-DICOM images, scanned PDF documents and JPEG images, as well as other forms of patient information. Support for IHE standards XDS and XDS-I helps enable complex information-sharing workflow across data repositories and DICOM/non-DICOM data types.
Dealing with data from multiple facilities
Another aspect of synchronization is dealing with data from multiple health care facilities that use different patient identification numbers and modality protocols. Powerful metadata manipulation techniques, such as PIX, MPI and DICOM Tag Morphing, enable patient data to be collected using a variety of search parameters including: medical record number, accession number, government ID or a patient demographic field such as name, date of birth or social security number.
Modern data technology and techniques provide mechanisms for health care providers to link data from different information systems at affiliated or unaffiliated health care facilities. While some data is easily communicated, delivering image data can be expedited through use of a universal image viewer that supports secure, real-time remote access from a variety of platforms including mobile devices such as iPads. This image viewer can provide efficient access to authorized users anywhere, anytime — which makes this technology very popular with physicians who want to review patient imaging studies and reports while they are making hospital rounds, or at their offices or homes.
