Moving enterprise imaging to the cloud can streamline workflows, improve data accessibility, and support future-ready healthcare organizations. Learn why a mature, cloud-native, vendor neutral archive (VNA) is essential for delivering better patient care and operational efficiency.
Managing patient information has come a long way. Most health systems have successfully implemented electronic health records (EHRs) to create a central source of truth for patient textual data. Over time, this investment proved its worth to healthcare providers, offering scalability and accessibility for care teams, and has become the standard for managing structured and unstructured patient, diagnosis, and treatment data.
But what about the other, much larger type of patient information? We’re talking about medical images or pixel data, which is highly diverse and ranges from digital pathology to cardiology and hemodynamics, to radiology, to 8K surgical videos, point-of-care ultrasounds (POCUS), and even photos and videos taken on a smartphone.
This imaging data explosion consumes vast amounts of storage to petabyte (PB) scale and is notoriously difficult to manage and share. The data silos across an enterprise are exacerbated by the lack of DICOM standards adoption which is common in healthcare systems. Other culprits of data silos are specialized diagnostic tools and the challenges of order-based workflows vs. encounter-based workflows. Most acute hospitals have only scratched the surface of breaking down all the pixel producing service lines and consolidating their data into a comprehensive source of truth with deep integration to the EHRs.
Many organizations rely on Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) or basic archives to manage imaging data. But, while useful, they often fall short of creating a truly unified system across all the data types and use cases of a health system. You might ask yourself: Is our imaging data genuinely interoperable? Can any clinician access any image, from anywhere, at any time? Is our current archive just a passive storage unit, or is it an active player in our workflow?
Likewise, if you have a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), you may ask…
These questions highlight a critical need. A comprehensive EHR strategy calls for an equally robust and integrated enterprise imaging strategy where patient information is image-enabled across the enterprise. The cornerstone of that strategy is a modern, mature VNA.
Whereas a basic VNA can store images, a mature VNA does so much more. It acts as an orchestrator of data, not just a passive archive. It offers advanced analytics, handles both DICOM and non-DICOM data, and provides tools for system administrators to manage the data lifecycle to meet their organization’s needs -- without having to rely on vendor support to do it.
Like anything else in healthcare, the future of managing medical imaging data is in the cloud, and for good reason.
A cloud-native VNA offers elasticity, scalability, security, and stability that inherently cannot be matched by server-based applications that are deployed on-premise, or by applications that have been moved to the cloud via “lift and shift”. In a cloud-native environment, everything is encrypted end-to-end. Multiple application containers spin up and down resources for the work that needs to be done at that time. That means there are no reasons for worry if your server is maximizing its CPU or RAM during peak times or migrations — the system will continue to run unimpeded. And if something does go wrong with a container, cloud-native is self-healing. The container is terminated and a new one is spun up automatically to replace it.
A modern VNA also provides as the data foundation needed to unlock AI capabilities in clinical and operational workflows. To effectively leverage AI for diagnostics and workflow automation, you need an image management engine that can enable data liquidity —something a passive archive simply cannot do. By adopting a solution that empowers owning, enhancing, and analyzing your data throughout its lifecycle, your organization can reap greater clinical value for care teams and reduce the technical burden on your IT team.
Choosing the right VNA means looking for one that is “more than a VNA.” It’s about finding a partner that can provide a solution built for interoperability, security, and scalability tailored to your organization’s growth. With decades of experience in innovating imaging solutions, including vendor neutral archives, Merge provides just that.
Having worked for decades with thousands of healthcare provider organizations, Merge has accumulated deep and broad expertise in the clinical and technical aspects of optimizing imaging workflows. Our experts are eager to share what they know to foster greater understanding of the potential benefits to be gained by well-informed technology decisions.
Ready to learn more about building a single source of truth for enterprise imaging in the cloud? Register for our virtual conversation, “One source of truth: Mastering Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud”, with John Hally, an expert in cloud-based imaging technology at Merge, and co-hosted with the Society for Imaging Informatics Management (SIIM) on March 31st from 12:00-1:00pm ET. You will learn about the potential role of cloud-native VNAs in your enterprise imaging cloud strategy, how VNAs support disaster recovery and data integrity, and how to get the most value from a true VNA so that clinicians enjoy more reliable imaging, IT enjoys less complexity, and patients enjoy better care.