From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The lack of workflow pressure on VNAs means they can do more in terms of informatics and storage. Sectra’s VNA exposes the archive to all of the open standards of PACS, but it also allows for including studies from non-radiology departments in the hospital. “That is really the key to VNAs,” says Collins.

“We spend a lot of time with the major EHR vendors in the industry, working with them and improving their access to our VNA and all of the images that we store in it,” says Collins, who describes it as a repository for documents and images alike.


A consolidating replacement market
Siemens’ Primo remembers when a major metropolitan area would have over one hundred independent hospitals, “but today there are a number of major health care delivery networks, which many of the once independent hospitals now belong to.” Disparate PACS in those hospital networks can cause interoperability challenges.

Those networks, or ACOs, will typically prefer a unified PACS serving the entire enterprise. “They want a PACS in the main data center to create a private or hybrid cloud, from which every physician in the ACO can access the images in the PACS through the EMR, experiencing the same user interface across all hospitals,” says Primo.

“Since all data access could then be centralized in one data center, the IT department could be able to control secure data access, grant user privileges and manage cyber security risks and threats centrally, instead of having to manage these issues separately in each hospital in the ACO,” says Primo.

Because PACS are a replacement market, and the equipment an ACO puts in will not be the same as the older systems they are taking out, Viztek’s Deaton says it’s important to have a technology representative doing the research and making informed decisions. Leaving those decisions to someone with a different expertise, like a managing radiologist, could result in hanging on to antiquated workflows.

“Somebody needs to come in and say, ‘This is where the rest of the world is technology- wise,’ and then you should have that functionality in your PACS,” says Deaton, who counts smart device and off-the-shelf computer compatibility among those essential features.

Consolidation is not only happening with care providers, it’s one of the biggest trends on the equipment end of the health care industry too. Merge Healthcare, a midlevel PACS provider, recently announced its acquisition of DR Systems, a long time competitor. The move will expand the New York-based company’s PACS footprint into the western U.S., while also allowing the company to compete with larger, multinational, vendors.

April 2015 Magazine

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