By John Hansen, Director of Product Marketing, TeraMedica Division of Fujifilm
Vendor-neutral archive (VNA) technology is changing how healthcare professionals capture, view, store, and distribute medical images and patient content. Radiology departments, for example, have known the value of VNAs for decades. Now as other medical specialties begin to require similar content sharing and storage capabilities, the number of potential use cases for VNA technology is greater than ever.
If you’re looking to invest in a clinical content-management solution, consider the following lessons learned so you can set up your organization for success in the future.
1. Bypassing Enterprise-wide Buy-in
Data capture and management capabilities may not always warrant the attention of the C-suite, department directors, and clinical leaders. However, it’s essential that senior-level decision makers fully understand VNA technology and how it can streamline operations and enhance patient care. This is particularly crucial when trying to ensure enterprise-wide adoption.
A VNA is designed to work across the entire enterprise, not just in one or two specialties. Getting executive level stakeholders involved in the decision-making process allows you to develop a strategy that benefits the entire organization. A senior-led initiative can also help drive enterprise- wide adoption.
Enterprise-wide buy-in can save your organization money by preventing multiple specialties from purchasing departmental solutions (each with support, maintenance, and integration costs) that can better be achieved with a single VNA solution.
2. Using Your VNA in Only a Few Specialties
VNAs aren’t just for radiology and cardiology. As other specialties increasingly generate multimedia content as a byproduct of patient care, it’s essential to leverage the technology across the entire enterprise, rather than in only a few specialties, to help care teams see the full patient picture.
At the TeraMedica Division of Fujifilm, Synapse® VNA was developed on a common platform architecture that clinicians can use in multiple specialties, such as dermatology, wound care, endoscopy, and point-of-care ultrasound. In fact, Synapse VNA integrates more specialties, more devices, and more data than any other VNA on the market.
3. Having No Data Storage Plan
In the past, when clinicians stored medical images on film or other analog media, studies could be checked out, lost, or simply thrown out when they were no longer needed. Obviously, this often resulted in incomplete patient medical records. Now that digital media has dramatically improved the way we store patient images, these records can be archived to preserve pertinent patient health information. They can also help to support future clinical research initiatives, such as in the field of biotechnology, for example. You can read more here about how Synapse VNA can help to fuel tomorrow’s biotech breakthroughs.
If you’re considering purchasing a VNA, you must make data storage and security a top priority. As more specialties leverage imaging to support comprehensive care delivery, and images become larger and more complex, storage technology will also need to keep pace. And it goes without saying, enterprises will need to ensure that these massive volumes of patient data stay safe and secure in the most cost-effective way.
Continuous advancements in storage technologies make it essential to partner with a VNA provider that can keep pace. For example, one whose storage architecture gives you the agility to adopt new storage technologies quickly and easily, and whose image lifecycle management (ILM) subsystem is designed to fully optimize your data storage plan. Synapse VNA’s ILM-centric architecture enables organizations to fully optimize storage. The solution automatically moves content to different storage technologies or tiers as it ages and employs higher compression ratios (if desired) to optimize cost.
4. Using a Piecemeal Approach
Some enterprises favor multi-vendor approaches to image sharing and management. However, advancements in VNA technology have made this unnecessary. Why would you purchase an archive, image viewer, collaboration tools, and worklist from different vendors? A multi-vendor approach turns you, the provider organization, into the test lab—the only place where all the disparate components finally come together. Instead, partner with one supplier that can provide each piece of the enterprise imaging puzzle, and that seamlessly integrates with third-party vendors to help make true imaging interoperability possible. With a single-vendor approach such as Synapse VNA from Fujifilm, you are ensured of seamless integration that is validated by the vendor with each release before arriving at your site.
Learn More from the TeraMedica Division of Fujifilm
With nearly two decades of experience, the TeraMedica Division of Fujifilm remains independently focused on leveraging its clinical capabilities to advance VNA technology, healthcare interoperability, and, most importantly, patient care. As the centerpiece of FUJIFILM Medical Systems U.S.A., Inc.’s comprehensive enterprise imaging portfolio, Synapse VNA provides the industry’s leading image- management solution.
Contact us to learn how the industry’s leading image-management solution can set up your VNA initiative for success.