Type:
Educational Exhibit
Keywords:
Patterns of Care, Image verification, Cost-effectiveness, Computer Applications-General, Teleradiology, RIS, PACS, Management, eHealth, Computer applications
Authors:
P. R. Hart; Milwaukee, WI/US
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2013/C-2178
Background
For as long as the IT infrastructure has been able to support it,
there has been a growing acceptance in the professional medical community that a single,
comprehensive,
digital patient record will lead to better informed and safer diagnoses. If it were universally available at the point of need one could also expect more timely,
effective and efficient treatments. Could this be a great idea whose time has come? Yes,
but,
as is often the case with paradigm-shifting realisations,
making it happen has proved easier said than done. Even so,
a small group of pioneers have developed solutions known as Vendor-Neutral Archives (VNA) which allow for a single-pane view of all clinical content.
The VNA field is relatively young and definitions vary,
but for this paper we shall take Vendor-Neutral Archive to mean a digital repository that is independent of the data source and serves multiple clinical applications both within and across medical specialties. The term itself,
which is now in general usage,
may yet be supplanted if a more meaningful one is coined to describe the same technology.
To justify its name,
a VNA must be general standards-based and accept,
distribute and display information from numerous digital systems,
modalities and file sources from any manufacturer,
IT solution or originating department. The defining characteristic of a VNA is that its design philosophy and functionality revolve around the patient. This is in stark contrast to most other healthcare file systems which are department-based and tied to the clinical applications that created them,
like PACS for medical imaging.