By Greg Strowig

With today's far-ranging health care challenges, it's hard to be neutral about Vendor Neutral Archiving (VNA). Given the technology's ability to translate data to a consistent format and enable communication across hospital departments, enterprises and disparate IT systems, the VNA has the ability to address many of today's most pressing healthcare issues -- from enabling communication of full diagnostic information across the continuum of care to supporting meaningful use compliance and cross-department analytics.

Additionally, after years of relinquishing some, if not all, control of PACS and other important data to IT vendors, a VNA puts healthcare facilities back in control.
VNAs are predicted to store 31% of all new imaging studies worldwide by 2016, according to a recent report by InMedica, the leading independent provider of market research and consultancy to the global medical electronics industry.

While specific definitions of the technology may vary, most experts agree that its key benefits include allowing sites complete control of their own data, interoperability among IT systems, information sharing as desired and analysis and use of this information in ways never before possible. In short, it enables imaging sites' data to be independent from the proprietary IT systems that so often restrict the usage and value of important medical information.

Key attributes of a VNA

--Patient-centric storage.
--Open standards.
--Management of images and related information.
--Support for query, storage and retrieval.
--Support for multiple departments, enterprise and regional architectures.
--Maintenance of patient privacy and security though audit trails.
--Transcends upgrades and changes of PACS and allows PACS solutions to be interchangeable.
--Elimination of future data migration and/or conversion of data formats.
--Hardware agnostic.
--IHE compliant and certified.

How the VNA provides a better way to archive

A VNA uses an approach to storage and data formats that neutralizes health care information by complying with shared standards independent of the vendor application that created it, in contrast to the approach of most PACS and other healthcare IT systems. Additionally, with a VNA, IT applications are no longer committed to physically addressed storage and communication with other systems through proprietary integration.

Underlying all of the benefits of a VNA is its consistent metadata format, which enables identification of all data for each patient, regardless of where the information entered the IT system.

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