I have been preaching the merits of a multi-phase deployment strategy for a Vendor Neutral Archive for some time now. This approach is very reminiscent of the deployment strategy for Radiology PACS adopted in the mid-1990’s. A properly configured VNA is an even larger system than an organization’s largest PACS, so it too represents a large investment.
Nevertheless, a lack of funding to cover the deployment of the complete VNA should not deter the organization from making a start. Every day going forward, the organization is forwarding a significant volume of new studies to their department PACS, which in the course of ingestion routinely makes proprietary modifications to the DICOM header. Those PACS-specific idiosyncrasies in the headers are the primary reason behind the expensive and time-consuming data migration that is required when a PACS is replaced or simply upgraded to a next generation. In effect, an organization is adding to its data migration liability every day that it continues to forward new study data to its department PACS. At the very least, the organization should consider a pro-active data migration project…whereby all of the image data being managed by its department PACS would be converted from the proprietary format to a Neutral format and simply parked in a separate storage solution.
Most of the Vendor Neutral Archive vendors can configure entry-level versions of their products that will perform this pro-active image data migration and simply store the result for future use. This approach makes an excellent Disaster Recovery solution that can be shared among multiple PACS.
I recently spoke at length about this subject with David Yeager, who is a freelance writer and editor. David spoke with several other individuals knowledgeable in this space and combined all of that information in a very comprehensive article on this subject. The article appears in the October issue of Radiology Today. David’s article is an easy read of a complex subject, so I encourage you to check it out here. The online article also contains some very simple graphics to reinforce the concepts.
There are several entry points to a multi-phase VNA deployment strategy. Replacing a PACS vendor’s DR solution with a Vendor Neutral DR solution is one such example that makes both strategic and financial sense.