A vendor neutral archive (VNA) enables healthcare practices like hospitals, imaging facilities, women’s imaging centers, and multicenter teleradiology practices, etc. to not only have centralized control over the access and storage of their studies and keep their existing PACS or EMR/EHR systems connected but also facilitates interoperability, business continuity, and cost reductions.
Here’s how healthcare practices benefit from having a VNA:
1) Data exchange & systems interoperability
A VNA follows DICOM and HL7 standards for storage and access to your data. These standards facilitate the required data exchange between different systems like your PACS, EMR, HIS, etc. regardless of the vendor. In addition, by using industry-accepted standards, a VNA connects and exchanges information with other systems without the need for integration, thereby enabling interoperability in healthcare.
2) Data ownership
You get full control over your data with a VNA. You can set up rules for data cleansing, routing, back up, etc. More importantly, having ownership of your data prevents vendor lock-in. This makes the process of data migration much smoother and helps avoid the high cost and effort associated with vendor lock-ins.
3) Image lifecycle management
VNAs make it easy for you to manage everything from image acquisition to dissemination to storage. This takes away the stress of keeping track of your data. You can keep your data better organized by setting up rules for auto purging for studies, managing multiple copies, deciding data location, etc. The option of having your data backed up on the cloud makes for a smart disaster recovery plan in the event of cyberattacks or natural disasters.
4) Storage cost reduction
Considering the increasing number of imaging studies, heavy image sizes, and the mandatory archiving period, the cost of storing images can be quite expensive if not managed efficiently. A VNA’s ability to compress images and provisions for short-term and long-term storage can help reduce storage costs significantly.
What makes RamSoft’s DICOM router ideal for healthcare practices?
Our Gateway™ DICOM router is a scalable solution that’s packed with the latest features to manage the dissemination and storage of all your medical images and documents in an efficient and secure manner whether on-premise or on the cloud. In addition to the aforementioned VNA benefits, the following routing benefits will improve your imaging workflow:
Multithreading: Achieve exceptional performance and reliability through multithreading which allows multiple studies to be sent/pulled in parallel which significantly improves the image transfer speed and reduces the wait times for viewing.
Smart pre-fetch: This advanced feature allows you the flexibility of matching priors based on patient ID, study description, modalities, etc., unlike most providers that only offer body part match.
Automatic data cleanse: All your incoming data could be analyzed and automatically cleansed by fixing the DICOM tags as required. This helps you avoid costly medical errors caused by data duplication.
Rules-based routing: You can set up rules to send studies from a particular imaging facility to a specific radiology group, decide the days and time for the studies to be sent, schedule backups, etc.
TLS encryption, DICOM replication (HTTPS) or DICOMweb: We support different communication methods with a proven record of security and much faster deployment than a traditional VPN connection. Moreover, the network performance matches or exceeds what a VPN can provide.
You can request a 30-day FREE trial of our Gateway™ DICOM router.
