From the June 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) have been a hot topic in recent years. Eric Rice, chief technology officer with VNA provider Mach7, explains: “Accessibility to unstructured clinical data, including radiology imaging, endoscopy videos, oncology reports and much more is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ feature for health care systems. State and federal regulations and incentives are pushing health care systems to make available complete medical records to patients and enable the data to be exchanged between providers.
For many health care systems, this may not be a simple task. Even within a single enterprise’s radiology department there may be numerous PACS vendor solutions following M&A activities. With the right vendor-neutral technologies, however, these challenges can be simplified. The value of consolidating unstructured clinical media within a vendor-neutral archive goes beyond the core dollar value savings in storage costs. A vendor-neutral archive is your EMR for clinical media — your unstructured clinical data. Your EMR for clinical media can provide the platform for data access, exchange and sharing across your enterprise ecosystem of clinical applications.”
The VNA market has been in flux, with a host of mergers and acquisitions over the past year. These include: the sale of Lexmark/Perceptics Software (formerly Acuo) to a Chinese consortium in April; Fuji purchasing TeraMedica last year; Merge Healthcare’s purchase by IBM in 2015; and Philips’ recent deal with Hitachi Data Systems. Mach7 recently completed its merger with Australian provider 3D Medical Limited, although both companies will ostensibly remain the same. This has many end users wondering just how stable the VNA market really is at a time when enterprise-wide solutions are becoming the name of the game and a central data repository is needed most.
Mach7’s Rice continues: “Our industry finds [itself] in a typical technology situation where demands from users have pushed vendors to deliver technologies ahead of the standards. Traditional PACS vendors were driven to come up with architectures, designs and features ahead of the standards. Today, however, the standards exist to interoperate and provide the clinical features required. Sadly, we find ourselves stuck with the legacy of proprietary formats and integrations that have locked us into yesterday’s technology. As a provider of vendor-neutral technologies, our job is to untangle that web and to accelerate our market beyond the challenges of the past so that we can focus on advancing our industry.”
