Cristine Kao
The challenges of vendor neutral archiving
October 17, 2013
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.
The ultimate goal is equipping clinicians with access to a patient’s complete medical history so they can deliver optimal diagnosis and treatment. Not only is it possible to achieve this objective, health care providers can also reduce costs at the same time — without undertaking the daunting task of consolidating information management systems.
Implementing a Cost Savings Strategy
The secret to cost savings is implementing a clinical information lifecycle management (CILM) software platform that manages data according to legal retention requirements. The rules of the platform (which can be personalized to meet each facility’s preferences) automatically delete information from multiple systems throughout the enterprise. These rules can be applied uniformly to multiple information systems and easily managed from a central location.
Lifecycle management can reduce current costs by curbing data growth through deletion of aging images and documents that no longer need to be maintained. This effort can also lower the cost of future data migration if a facility decides to adopt a consolidated archive.
Several key concepts for vendor-neutral archiving are essential to success: the ability to identify, synchronize and access images and various types of data that relate to each patient regardless of the storage location; and use of search parameters to collect information stored across multiple health care facilities that use different accession and medical record numbers. As part of this effort, health care facilities can simultaneously implement lifecycle management software to lower current and future expenses related to data storage. All of these activities should serve the overarching goal — presenting a holistic view of a patient’s medical history so clinicians can deliver an accurate diagnosis and determine the best course of treatment for each patient.
About the author: Cristine Kao is the global marketing director for Carestream's Healthcare Information Solutions portfolio, which includes RIS+PACS, vendor-neutral archiving, business intelligence/reporting tools and cloud services. She has more than 10 years of international experience in sales and marketing for healthcare IT solutions.
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.
The ultimate goal is equipping clinicians with access to a patient’s complete medical history so they can deliver optimal diagnosis and treatment. Not only is it possible to achieve this objective, health care providers can also reduce costs at the same time — without undertaking the daunting task of consolidating information management systems.
Implementing a Cost Savings Strategy
The secret to cost savings is implementing a clinical information lifecycle management (CILM) software platform that manages data according to legal retention requirements. The rules of the platform (which can be personalized to meet each facility’s preferences) automatically delete information from multiple systems throughout the enterprise. These rules can be applied uniformly to multiple information systems and easily managed from a central location.
Lifecycle management can reduce current costs by curbing data growth through deletion of aging images and documents that no longer need to be maintained. This effort can also lower the cost of future data migration if a facility decides to adopt a consolidated archive.
Several key concepts for vendor-neutral archiving are essential to success: the ability to identify, synchronize and access images and various types of data that relate to each patient regardless of the storage location; and use of search parameters to collect information stored across multiple health care facilities that use different accession and medical record numbers. As part of this effort, health care facilities can simultaneously implement lifecycle management software to lower current and future expenses related to data storage. All of these activities should serve the overarching goal — presenting a holistic view of a patient’s medical history so clinicians can deliver an accurate diagnosis and determine the best course of treatment for each patient.
About the author: Cristine Kao is the global marketing director for Carestream's Healthcare Information Solutions portfolio, which includes RIS+PACS, vendor-neutral archiving, business intelligence/reporting tools and cloud services. She has more than 10 years of international experience in sales and marketing for healthcare IT solutions.