by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | February 11, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“In an environment where everybody expects to get something for nothing, you have to develop methodologies where you drive down the cost of the product,” says Giesberg. “It’s not clear whether cloud computing would do this, but it could possibly help eliminate lots of hardware and maintenance costs to the end-users, which would be beneficial and would potentially allow them to see images anywhere, anytime, anyhow.”
VNAs in store
Vendor-neutral archives have also been generating interest among radiologists. As information sharing across the enterprise becomes an essential component of health care, providers are looking for ways to archive and access images coming in from different systems on one platform.
A 2009 report by health care research firm KLAS found that many providers are looking to their PACS vendor as a potential partner in the enterprise imaging endeavor, while others are considering storage and archiving solutions vendors.
Although several companies have already introduced VNA solutions, some providers are still trying to grasp the concept and anticipate seeing the details play out in the next five years or so. “I still think that the jury’s out on what that really means or what that’s going to look like,” says Henry Ford’s Halabi.
VNAs are gaining traction across the pond, according to Mike Battin, COO of PACSHealth, whose company conducts a significant amount of business in the United Kingdom. “It hasn’t really become a requirement in the U.S. people haven’t heard about it yet,” he says.
A look at other trends
The PACS market may be a mature one but providers continue to look for solutions that address workflow and interoperability.
But before digging into specific features, radiologists tend to get a “feel” of any given system. It’s important to have “an easy-to-use interface, something where I can read the study and go on to the next one,” says Pitt Radiology’s Friedman. “Some vendors get that and some don’t.”
A user-friendly platform goes hand-in-hand with the capability to customize workflow and vendors are quick to respond. Poiesis Informatics, a fairly new player in the radiology market and a first time RSNA exhibitor at last year’s meeting, centers its products on the philosophy of workflow orchestration.
Claudine Martin, the company’s president, says radiologists shouldn’t have to navigate between different systems to find the information that they need. “These solutions should interoperate and integrate seamlessly so that the end-user doesn’t have to be the integrating agent,” she says. “They don’t have to be the person that has to launch multiple systems, multiple windows and multiple log-ins.”
