Healthcare IT News: Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA)

Vendor-neutral archive (VNA) is a medical imaging technology that helps in storing vital medical records (medical images) and documents in a standard format that can be easily accessed by other systems in a healthcare organization. A medical imaging solution called PAC (picture archiving and communications) prevents clinicians from accessing patient images from different departments at the same time. Instead, the clinicians have to log into separate systems to see a single patient’s images from various departments, including radiology, cardiology, dental, and pathology. PAC systems are not optimized and cannot contain large amounts of unstructured image data that is required by clinicians for improving patient care. Such limitations of PAC systems call for the utilization of VNAs. VNAs allow organizations to combine the viewing and storage of different health IT systems, despite vendor restrictions.